Saarbrücken computer science and language science students want to convince Professor Alexander Koller to stay

Saarland University Computer Science and Language Science and Technology students participating in the torch run. Photo: İzzettin Algan

In keeping with a long-standing tradition in Saarbrücken computer science, the student councils of Computer Science and of Language Science and Technology (LST) jointly organized a torchlight procession to honor Professor Doctor Alexander Koller, supported by the Freunde der Saarbrücker Informatik (FdSI) and Friends of LST. The aim was to convince the professor, who has received a call from another university, to continue his teaching and research at Saarland University.

On the evening of December 4, 2025, around 80 students and several professors gathered in front of building C7.4 and walked with torches across campus to the computer science department and back, before rounding off the event with hot mulled wine and non-alcoholic punch in C7.2.

“I am extremely grateful to the students for this remarkable sign of appreciation,” says Alexander Koller. “Torchlight processions are a beautiful tradition in Saarbrücken computer science, and I feel deeply honored that so many students have taken up this tradition in our field as well.”

Alexander Koller is Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Language Science and Technology and also holds a courtesy professorship in Computer Science, both at Saarland University. He heads the Computational Linguistics group and serves as speaker of the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action”. His research focuses on computational models of meaning and reasoning in natural language processing, particularly dialog systems, interactive natural language generation and neurosymbolic approaches to semantic parsing. His work has received multiple distinctions at leading conferences such as the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and he is a member of the ELLIS Saarbrücken unit.

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
900 scientists (including 400 PhD students) and about 2,500 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Europe. Four world-renowned research institutes cover the entire spectrum of computer science, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs.