Coordination Funds

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Franke
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579278587

While modern language technology increasingly permeates many areas of applications, much of its input-output behavior and its inner mechanics remains unknown. As a result, recent years have seen a newly emerging field of interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse work at the interface between the cognitive language sciences (broadly construed) and language technology (focused on neural language models, but not exclusively). However, many foundational and methodological issues remain unclear. The overarching goal of this Priority Programme is therefore to channel cross-disciplinary efforts dedicated to the understanding, testing and safe application of modern language technology (with a focus on language modeling).The Priority Programme LaSTing addresses researchers in the interdisciplinary field of the cognitive and computational language sciences (including classical disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, computer science and others) who seek to advance our understanding of language modeling from a theoretical or empirical point of view, or use modern language technology as a tool for innovative theoretical and empirical research in the cognitive language sciences. Individual projects are expected to relate to at least one of the Priority Area’s core issues, which are robust assessment, safe applicability and foundational questions (as detailed in the following). The Priority Programme especially encourages contributions that seek to address these core issues by bringing to bear concepts and methods from the theoretical/empirical language sciences.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2556: Robust Assessment & Safe Applicability of Language Modeling: Foundations for a New Field of Language Science & Technology (LaSTing)