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For Marie Bexte, it was clear for a long time: "I didn't want to go abroad until I was a bit more established in my PhD phase, so that I could contribute and bring something concrete back. Now the time had come: together with Prof. Dr. Torsten Zesch, in whose research professorship Marie Bexte works, she found points of contact with the working group of Prof. Paula Buttery and with Dr. Andrew Caines, who is now her direct supervisor at ALTA. "We want to find out to what extent we can automatically, i.e. with the help of AI models, determine how well a given answer matches a displayed image. So it's also about content scoring. To do this, we are working with data from language learners who see a series of images and are asked to tell the story depicted in them," explains the researcher. The data come from the British working group.

The aim of Marie Bexte's two-month stay is to write a joint paper on this very research question. "It is nice to realize that we are on the same level, just because we come from the same field. But of course it's also exciting to see how other groups work. How do they communicate and support each other? What regular meetings do they have? For example, I found a voluntary internal review of papers before an important deadline to be very helpful," says Marie.

Living like Harry Potter

Foto: Privat

In addition to the actual academic work, a stay abroad naturally brings other impressions with it. In Great Britain, the academic year is divided into trimesters. Marie Bexte is there for the Lent term, which runs two months. This means that she is not assigned to a college. To do so, she would have had to spend at least six months in the country. "Unfortunately, I'm missing part of the 'Harry Potter' experience," says Marie Bexte. "You can think of studying as being like the different houses in the Harry Potter movies - there are colleges that each have their own coat of arms," she explains. "And often in such honorable, impressive buildings that look more like a movie set than a dormitory."

Patience and food for thought

Overall, the researcher reports a good exchange with her international colleagues. Initially, however, this did not happen as quickly as she had imagined: "I had to learn to be patient. I wanted to start right away and produce results quickly. But of course, it took a while before I had access to everything or knew the right people.” And what else? "It is always fun to see that other people enjoy research as much as I do. Regular lectures by external scientists are also a great way to get food for thought. And: I will come back as an expert for test alarms - they happen here every week!"