Blog CRC1646

From April 1 to July 31, 2026, I had the pleasure of working as a guest researcher at the on Linguistic Creativity in Communication in project B02 on “Computational linguistic creativity in reference games between interactive dialogue agents”. I recently completed my PhD in Cognitive Science, during which I used reference games to study conceptual abstraction through interactive experiments and computational models. My research thus aligns very well with the topics studied and the methods used in B02. It was exciting to learn more about the group’s past and current research and discuss future collaborative projects. My personal goals for this research visit were to start new collaborations, gain new project ideas for my current PostDoc phase, and to extend my professional network within the Computational Linguistics community. These goals were achieved in a very welcoming and stimulating environment within the CRC and the two research groups of Sina Zarrieß and Hendrik Buschmeier on Computational and Digital Linguistics.

The four months of my research visit went by very quickly. My weeks were structured by my teaching obligations at my home university in Osnabrück, where I work as a PostDoc in the Psycho-/Neurolinguistics group at the Institute of Cognitive Science, and commuting to Bielefeld for discussions of our collaborative research with Sina Zarrieß and other colleagues. Each day I spent in Bielefeld, I felt at home on campus, in my office, and having lunch at the mensa with the wonderful colleagues in the Computational and Digital Linguistics groups. There were also numerous highlights during my visit: In April, B02 organized a workshop on “Computational Modeling of Creativity & Interactive Reference Games” with invited speakers from the international Computational Linguistics community. Results from the workshop’s brainstorming session will form the basis of a collaborative research project in which Sina Zarrieß and I will work with Ece Takmaz (Utrecht University) and Tessa Verhoef (Leiden University). Our goal is to develop interactive language models trained on human-scale data and use them to study aspects of linguistic creativity that arise from interactive and communicative pressures, goals, and intentions.

In May, I attended the SAIL project’s closing conference at CITEC featuring very interesting talks and posters around the topic of sustainable AI. I especially enjoyed the keynote talks by Katharina Eggensperger on tabular machine learning and by Mira Merzini on the role (and the risks!) of using LLMs in software development. I also joined colloquium sessions by the CRC and the Linguistics department and presented my own research on “The role of pragmatic and communicative factors in conceptual abstraction” in the Linguistics colloquium organized by Anke Himmelreich and Oliver Bott. I genuinely enjoyed the discussions with researchers from the Linguistics department about conceptual pacts, hierarchically organized concepts in different languages, and how the AI agents I trained conceptualize their world, among other topics. I received great feedback and many ideas for new experiments in the Q&A after my talk!

My conclusion is very positive: I had the pleasure of supporting an ongoing project of B02 on the communicative efficiency of LLMs in visually uncommon reference games, joined another ongoing project led by on an LLM-based analysis of the Alternative Use Task creativity test, and developed a project on LLM creativity with and . I was involved in two conference submissions, got new inspiration for future research projects, and discussed mentoring and career-related topics with Sina Zarrieß and Hendrik Buschmeier. Now I am looking forward to collaborating more on and finalizing the exciting projects that we’ve started together! Thank you, everyone, for welcoming me in Bielefeld and making this such a great and rewarding experience!

Foto: Kristina Kobrock © Kristina Kobrock