Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg

Vera Demberg is a professor for Computer Science and Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and Max Planck Research Fellow at the MPI for Informatics in Saarbrücken. Her research focus is on the intersection of Natural Language Processing and (Computational) Psycholinguistics. She specifically works on reliable and controllable neural language generation, individual differences in discourse and pragmatic processing in humans, as well as multimodal language models. She currently holds an ERC Starting Grant “Individualized Interaction in Discourse” (IDDISC).
Her most impactful publication was published at Cognition in 2008 by Demberg and Keller; it demonstrates that psycholinguistic theories of human sentence processing can be evaluated on broad-coverage naturalistic reading time corpora using NLP methods. Previously, such theories had only been evaluated on experimental datasets.
Vera Demberg is currently a member-at-large of the ACL Executive Board. She has been elected as a member of the academy of sciences and literature Mainz.