Sarah Ebling is Full Professor ad personam for Language, Technology and Accessibility at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Based in the field of computational linguistics, her research focuses on language-based assistive technologies in the context of persons with disabilities. The focus is on basic and application-oriented research into the development and reception of these technologies. As such, for example, methods of natural language processing (NLP) are used, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI).

Sarah Ebling's research takes place in the context of hearing and visual impairments, cognitive impairments, and language disorders. She deals with sign language technologies, automatic text simplification, technologies for the audio description process and computer-aided language sample analysis. Transversal to this is a focus on multimodality, i.e., on dealing with assistive technologies and aspects of digital accessibility across modalities, e.g., with different production modalities in sign languages (manual and non-manual components), with text and video as part of automatic translation of audio descriptions or with text and images as part of automatic text simplification.

She is involved in international (EU H2020) and national (SNSF Sinergia) projects and is PI of a large-scale Swiss innovation project entitled «Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies» (2022-2026; budget 12 mio.).

Sarah Ebling studied German Linguistics and Literature, Computational Linguistics and English Linguistics at the Universities of Zurich and Heidelberg. She completed research stays in Dublin, Chicago and Rochester NY. She defended her doctoral thesis entitled «Automatic Translation from German to Synthesized Swiss German Sign Language» in February 2016 (summa cum laude).