In March 2025, the Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) established the Priority Programme “Robust Assessment & Safe Applicability of Language Modelling: Foundations for a New Field of Language Science & Technology (LaSTing)” (SPP 2556). The programme is designed to run for six years in two phases. The present call invites proposals for the first three-year funding period.

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.

Examples of more concrete research questions that fit into these three core issues are:

• Behavioural Assessment: What are adequate, robust methods of experimentally assessing the (abstracted, linguistic) capability of an LM based on its input-output behaviour? What is a valid comparison of machine predictions with human behaviour?
• Representations & Mechanisms: Which information is reliably retrievable from LMs’ latent representations (embeddings) for linguistic/explanatory purposes or for understanding the inner workings of LMs? How can we distil the abstract computational processes that generate an LM’s behaviour?
• Training & Optimisation: How can we understand LMs in terms of their optimisation, e.g. in terms of properties of the training data, their internal inductive biases, the training objective etc.? How does that compare with human language learning?
• Task Decomposition Models: What are best practices for using LMs as part of a larger (theoretically informed) composition of the task to be solved (e.g. in agent models, applications such as RAG, or explanatory, neuro-symbolic (cognitive) models)?
• Resource Efficiency: How can we solve problems of data-hunger and computational costs (training and inference), e.g. by taking human-like inductive biases into account, or using more informative, curated data? How can we use synthetic data and machine judgements to solve theoretical issues?
• Alternative Models: How can language science benefit from alternative models beyond text-to-text LMs, e.g. by embracing multi-modality, interaction, dialogue or more cognitively plausible model architectures?
• Ontological Status: Are LMs models or theories of language? What exactly does an LM predict (occurrence frequencies, behaviour of an idealised speaker, aggregated behaviour of a population of speakers …)?
• Explanatory Potential: How can novel language technology be used as or in support of explanations, e.g. of linguistic phenomena, empirical or experimental data in the language sciences?
• LM capabilities: What are the limits of LM capabilities and why? How can we systematically identify them, also for future generations of language modelling/technology?

Examples of work that is outside the scope of this Priority Programme are efforts geared mainly at improving system performance (e.g. based on some benchmark score). Also, projects that merely seek new areas of application with established tools, as long as there is little or no reflection on methods or concepts, or any other bearing on the knowledge-oriented cognitive language sciences.

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.

Proposal Instructions

Please submit your proposal to the DFG by 30 September 2025. Proposals are to be submitted solely via the elan portal(externer Link), the DFG’s electronic proposal processing system, in order to ensure proposal-related data is recorded and documents are securely transmitted. To submit a proposal, go to Proposal Submission – New Project/Draft Proposal – Priority Programmes and select “SPP 2556” from the current list of calls. 

If this is the first time you are submitting a proposal to the DFG, please note that you must register in the elan portal before you can submit your proposal. You must do so by 23 September 2025. During the registration process, select “SPP 2556” from the list of calls. You will normally receive confirmation of your registration by the next working day.

When preparing your proposal, please note the Guidelines Priority Programme (DFG form 50.05(interner Link), section B “Individual Projects within Existing Priority Programmes”) and the Proposal Preparation Instructions – Project Proposals (DFG form 54.01(interner Link)). These forms are available on the DFG website and through the elan portal.

By submitting a proposal under this programme, applicants agree to the DFG sharing all necessary information with the coordinator of the Priority Programme after the call deadline.

Funding decisions are expected to be completed in March 2026. 

Equity and Diversity

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.

Good Research Practice

According to a resolution of the DFG General Assembly, DFG funding may only be awarded to research institutions that have implemented the guidelines laid down in the Code of Conduct for Safeguarding Good Research Practice(externer Link) in their own regulations. The management of your institution is responsible for implementing the guidelines in a legally binding manner. In order to avoid delays in the disbursement of funding, please verify implementation within your institution in good time. For information regarding the implementation, please refer to the Research Integrity Portal(externer Link). If you have any questions on this subject, please contact the Research Integrity team(externer Link) at the DFG Head Office. 

Further Information

More information on the Priority Programme is available under: www.lasting-spp.org(externer Link)

When submitting a proposal, please use the elan portal(externer Link) and refer to the Guidelines Priority Programme (DFG form 50.05(interner Link), section B “Individual Projects within Existing Priority Programmes”), and the Proposal Preparation Instructions – Project Proposals (DFG form 54.01(interner Link)). The FAQ about preparing a proposal(interner Link) may also be helpful.

For enquiries about the scientific aims of the Priority Programme, please contact the Priority Programme coordinator:

Professor Dr. Michael Franke, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Fachbereich Neuphilologie, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, phone +49 7071 / 29 781 78, michael.franke@uni-tuebingen.de(externer Link)

Contact Persons at the DFG Head Office

Programme contact: 

Dr. Helga Weyerts-Schweda, Humanities and Social Sciences 2, phone +49 228 885-2046, helga.weyerts-schweda@dfg.de(externer Link)

Administrative contact: 

Melanie Klein, Humanities and Social Sciences 2, phone +49 228 885-2843, melanie.klein@dfg.de(externer Link)

Privacy Policy

We, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), take the protection of your personal data and its confidential treatment extremely seriously. Therefore, please refer to the DFG’s Privacy Policy(interner Link). If you intend to transmit personal data of third parties, please make sure to do so only if the necessary legitimation under data protection law exist. Before transmitting data of third parties to the DFG, please forward the DFG’s Data Protection Notice to the individuals affected (data subjects). If there is a legitimate interest not to inform individuals beforehand (e.g. for reasons of secrecy or in case of a nomination or candidate proposal), these individuals should be informed no later than at the time of publication.