Understanding changes everything

Associate Professor of Linguistics – Saarland University

I study variation in how we exchange and process information through language.

My expertise builds on more than a decade of research into how language varies across contexts, communities and time, using computational and information-theoretic methods.

Increasingly, I am interested in the people behind these patterns:
how individual differences in information processing shape the way we communicate and understand each other.

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Recent News

Jan 2026 – I’m hiring! If you’re a psychologist, psycholinguist, experimental linguist, apply to this position where we are going to run experiments in virtual reality settings to investigate how differences in sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) influence communicative patterns, language adaptation processes, and interaction processes. Virtual reality environments (MetaQuest3) are used to experimentally manipulate environmental conditions (e.g., light, background noise) and social stimuli (e.g., friendly vs. unfriendly conversation partners). Follow this link for the call. 

May 2025 – Our group is going to be at NAACL 2025 and the SIGHUM LaTeCH-CLfL Workshop in Albuquerque NM, where we are going to present work on propagandistic narratives, personality traits from the Big Fives in LLMs, and Multi-Word Expressions in English Scientific writing.

April 2025 – Sofia Aguilar and I participated and gave a talk at the Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science at TU Berlin organized by Gerd Graßhoff, Arno Simons, Adrian Wüthrich, and Michael Zichert. It has been a very valuable experience presenting our CASCADE work on modeling change in language use with information-theoretic methods and Graph Neural Nets and being able to exchange thoughts with historians, philosophers and sociologist next to LLM experts.

March 2025 – We successfully organized the 2nd Camp in our CASCADE project (EU Horizon MSCA Doctoral Network). Two packed days of activities included ESR group work & brainstorming sessions; poster presentations and even a guided tour of 500 years of Saarbrücken history at the SAAR Historical Museum. Read more here 

LaTeCH-CLfL 2025 workshop accepted at NAACL (in Albuquerque). CfP is out: Consider submitting! Deadline. Jan 30th 2025.

Attending with the CASCADE group Camp 1 of our EU MSCA Network in Sheffield. Looking forward to our first in-person meeting of all ECRs and PI in the project! (Nov. 25th-28th 2024)

Invited to join an international reading group on Studying Science with Digital Methods organized by Catherine Herfeld (Prof. of Philosophy at Leibniz Hannover Universität leading an ERC on Model Transfer) and Charles H. Pence (Assoc. Prof. for the History of Science at UC Louvain). Excited to exchange thoughts with historians of science! (Winter term 2024/25)

From the SFB1102-B1 Project and the CASCADE project, we’re going to visit our colleagues in Stuttgart at IMS for the workshop on Semantic change of MultiWordExpressions. (Oct. 26-27, 2024)

I’ve been invited to talk at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Zentrum für Informatik in the Seminar Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Information (Oct. 2-4, 2024)

We’ve kick-started our MSCA CASCADE projects this month (Sept. 2024) with my team members Sofía Aguilar (MA in Bioengineering and Intelligent Computing) and Anastasiia Vestel (MA in Technology for Translation and Interpreting).