TRN-Project Knowledge in Context: Language and Thinking in Natural and Life Sciences
In a research consortium of the European Center for Linguistics (EZS) and the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH) in collaboration with Field of Focus 1 (PD Dr. Meike Weis and Prof. Dr. Stefan Schönberg) and Field of Focus 2 (Prof. Dr. Michael Gertz), Dr. Maria Becker, Prof. Dr. Vahram Atayan, Prof. Dr. Bogdan Babych, and Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder are conducting research in multilingual linguistics on the transfer of medical knowledge to lay audiences with the help of artificial intelligence.
The project is funded as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments.
Principal Investigators in German Linguistics:
Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Felder
Dr. Maria Becker
Research Staff in German Linguistics:
Bruno Brocai
Overview
Contemporary society is a dominated by the discursive circulation of knowledge and faces a wide range of challenges. On the one hand—and long before the Covid-19 pandemic—there has been an increasing need for reliable knowledge as the basis for both political and individual decision-making. On the other hand—not only with the rise of populist movements but especially through the uncritical exposure to scientific results and interpretations in digital contexts—the status of science and of the expert communities has come under pressure and is no longer universally accepted.
This situation deserves particular attention in the so-called hard sciences. Against this background, the following dichotomy can be observed: knowledge in the natural and life sciences is often hermetically sealed and accessible only to insiders; yet, at the same time, our socio-political order presupposes an informed _zoon politikon_ that requires sound understanding of these fields in order to act responsibly. Adequate linguistic and cognitive access to findings from the natural and life sciences can also be of central importance on the individual level (e.g., _informed consent_ in medical treatment contexts).
There is, therefore, a need for a systematic analysis of knowledge transfer and knowledge processing in society. Such analyses require close collaboration between linguistic research on specialized communication, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and computer science, as well as natural and life sciences that are interested in public communication. > Within our interdisciplinary project team, we aim to develop a reusable and scalable research infrastructure as well as a knowledge-transfer platform. These will enable and facilitate efficient knowledge transfer by drawing on modern methods from computer science and machine learning.
Objective
The project aims to examine different constellations of communication in the natural and life sciences, focusing on the linguistic and epistemic conditions that shape both intra- and interdisciplinary discourse. By combining methods from discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, the project seeks to develop a systematic scientific approach. Drawing on domain-specific expertise, it aims to identify the differences and commonalities in explicit and implicit knowledge, as well as in linguistic conventions, across four types of communicative situations:
- intradisciplinary expert communication (for example, between two radiologists),
- interdisciplinary expert communication (for instance, between a radiologist and a human geneticist),
- communication in academic training (such as in a university lecture)
- communication aimed at lay audiences (for example, between a doctor and a patient during consultation)
The results of this research are intended to support improved knowledge transfer and to contribute to the further development of knowledge within society at large—in the spirit of Citizen Science.