The research group (Lehrstuhl) of Prof. Hinrichs explores the theoretical foundations of corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science, as well as application areas of natural language processing. Special emphasis is given to the following areas of research:

• Grammar Formalisms
• Discourse Semantics 
• Developing sustainable tools to allow computer-aided language processing.
• Developing German Language Resources for Morphology, Syntax and Semantics
• Information Retrieval
• Dialectometry
• Computational Linguistic Support for eLearning
• Machine Learning for Natural Language

The research group participates, or has participated in the following Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereich - SFB) 

• "The Construction of Meaning - the Dynamics and Adaptivity of Linguistic Structures" (SFB 833; 2009-2013)
• "Linguistic Data Structures: On the Relation between Data and Theory in Linguistics" (SFB 441; 1999-2008)
• "Linguistic Foundations for Computational Linguistics" (SFB 340; 1988-2000),

Many of the group's research projects have been sponsored by third-party funding agencies such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Commission. 

The department is a member of the Tübingen Center for Linguistics (TÜZ-LI) and works closely together with other leading general- and computer- linguistic institutes and research centers in Germany and abroad. 

As part of the Competence Center Computational Linguistics (KCL; 2000-2005), the department worked toward increasing the awareness in industry of the commercial potential of language technology.