Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank holds MCDS Distinguished Lecture in FSS 2026

On March 12, 2026, Barbara Plank from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München delivered the Distinguished Lecture as part of the MCDS Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Mannheim. In her talk titled “Human-centered LLMs for Inclusive Language Technology,” she discussed new approaches to developing more human-centered and inclusive language technologies. Around 40 students and researchers attended the lecture, which was moderated by Prof. Florian Keusch.

Barbara Plank is Full Professor of AI and Computational Linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Co-Director of the Center for Information and Language Processing, and Head of the MaiNLP (Munich AI and NLP) Lab. As an ELLIS Fellow and ERC grantee, she is actively involved in international research communities, including the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL). Her research combines robust, data-centric, and human-inspired approaches in Natural Language Processing.

In her lecture, Barbara Plank highlighted that language is inherently diverse, ambiguous, and highly context-dependent – characteristics that current Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to fully capture. Drawing on recent research from her group, she illustrated how language models deal with linguistic variation, dialects, and differing human interpretations, and where challenges arise with respect to fairness, robustness, and trust.

A central theme of her talk was how language technologies can be developed in a more human-centered way. Plank argued for systematically incorporating linguistic diversity into data, modeling, and evaluation in order to build language technologies that are more accessible and reliable for diverse user groups. She emphasized the importance of data-centric and human-inspired approaches that better reflect real-world language use and the needs of different language communities.

The lecture attracted strong interest from researchers, students, and other guests and provided an opportunity for lively discussions about current developments in trustworthy and inclusive AI language technologies.

MCDS would like to sincerely thank Prof. Plank for her visit to Mannheim and looks forward to continuing the Distinguished Lecture Series.