Calls for Applications – Psychology
27.05.2025
DFG: Priority Programme “Robust Assessment & Safe Applicability of Language Modelling: Foundations for a New Field of Language Science & Technology (LaSTing)”
Deadline: 30 September 2025
While modern language technology increasingly permeates many areas of applications, much of its input-output behaviour 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 modelling).
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 modelling 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.
Robust assessment
Given the very rapid pace of recent developments, careful reflection on standards for the methodology of testing and assessment is lagging behind. What is required is a joint effort to converge on proper standards for robust assessment of language models. Methodology is robust, in the sense intended here, if its results are generalisable (carrying over with sufficient certainty to other models and data sets), transferable (insightful beyond the purposes of understanding a single type of computational model), and reproducible (with the same or different models and data sets). Robust methodology also aspires to be as future-proof as possible, i.e. likely relevant to the next generation of models or the next set of antagonistic examples.
Safe applicability
As language technology gets applied more and more widely, concerns of safe applicability become ever more important. Safe applicability subsumes critical aspects such as being conceptually sound (e.g. anchored in “first principles” or established empirical knowledge), validated (e.g. by mathematical proof or other rigorous derivation) or at least stress-tested across a near-exhaustive traversal of possible conditions of use, ethical (e.g. bias- and harm-free, or privacy-respecting), and also economical (i.e. minimising data requirements and energy consumption). Issues of safe applicability loom particularly large in the context of high-stake implications, of which application in the scientific process is a special case. The Priority Area LaSTing therefore also particularly invites contributions on the reflection of safe applicability of language technology for knowledge gain in the cognitive language sciences.
Foundational questions
Progress on understanding the behaviour of language models and their safe applicability is inexorably tied to a better understanding of their core mechanisms and the impact of their training data or their training objectives. But just as relevant are deep foundational questions concerning the nature of language models (e.g. what are LMs models of?) and their proper role in the scientific research into human language (e.g. how could LMs be used as explanatory tools for understanding human language?). In response to these issues, the Priority Programme especially welcomes foundational work addressing general properties or potential limits of particular classes of language models, e.g. by using mathematical arguments, simulations studies, tight conceptual argumentation or a mixture of such methods.
In order to achieve its goals, LaSTing requires broad and deep interdisciplinary collaboration. The Priority Programme therefore implements an extensive suite of individual measures to support diversity, networking and dissemination, and to ensure the success of early career researchers and scholars with backgrounds underrepresented in academic research. Early career researchers are explicitly encouraged to submit their own proposals.
Please submit your proposal to the DFG by 30 September 2025.
The DFG strongly welcomes proposals from researchers of all genders and sexual identities, from different ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological or social backgrounds, from different career stages, types of universities and research institutions, and with disabilities or chronic illness. With regard to the subject-specific focus of this call, the DFG encourages female researchers in particular to submit proposals.
Further information:
https://www.dfg.de/de/aktuelles/neuigkeiten-themen/info-wissenschaft/2025/ifw-25-32