Sonderforschungsbereich 732:

The SFB 732 terminated on 30th June, 2018. The websites are no longer updated.

Mit großer Trauer teilen wir mit, dass Professor Dr. Grzegorz Dogil, der Lehrstuhlinhaber für Experimentelle Phonetik, nach langer Krankheit am Dienstag, den 26.12.2017, gestorben ist.

The SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context is a collaborative research centre (Sonderforschungsbereich) funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG),  which was established in 2006 and has been renewed in 2010 and 2014. In its 16 research projects and the integrated graduate school it brings together more than 40 researchers from the Institute of Natural Language Processing and the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.

Their common scientific goal is to achieve a better understanding of the mechanisms that lead to ambiguity control/disambiguation as well as the enrichment of missing/incomplete information and to develop methods that are able to fully describe these mechanisms. The basic hypothesis in the SFB is that such processes generally involve specification of an underspecified input.
Research in the second phase of funding focusses on the following two questions:
(i) What type of architecture is the most adequate to explain specification processes?
(a pipeline model, an interface model, or rather an integrated model?)
(ii) What role does the size and the granularity of the context play in the specification process?
Our research involves statistical, rule-based, comparative and corpus-based methods, to which we will add  experimental methods in the second phase of funding.
We see the SFB, with its many parallel explorations of specification in context, as providing a unique opportunity for gaining a better general understanding of how exactly specification works in context and in particular languages. We believe that not only will a successful collaboration between theoretical linguistics and natural language processing give us a better understanding of incremental specification in language, but it will also greatly advance the state of the art in both research areas as methods and results are more widely exchanged and adopted.

Starting with the second phase of funding (July 2010), the SFB 732 is complemented by an integrated graduate school (MGK).

The goal of the integrated graduate school is to provide the PhD students in the SFB with a structured qualification program for academic training and a forum for mutual exchange and feedback. To this end, a teaching program aims at broadening the background and improving the professional opportunities of the PhD students, to ensure further qualification of the graduate school members. Additionally, graduate school members meet regularly to present and discuss their postgraduate work in an equal-status group and to encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary research.

Short-term one-year research grants for PhD students serve as a special tool for mutual exchange and collaborative work. The grants are closely linked to individual projects of the SFB.

Please check out the MGK site for more information.