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I studied linguistics (“Germanic Philology”) and psycholinguistics in Belgium at the Universities of Antwerp and Leuven. I moved to The Netherlands in 1984 to work as a research assistant at the University of Nijmegen in Gerard Kempen’s group, which was pioneering language technology in The Netherlands at the time. After military service I worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Luc Steels in Brussels, where I was responsible for an ESPRIT project on office automation and was allowed to work on a PhD.
In 1987 I finished my Ph.D. (University of Leuven) on an object-oriented model of Dutch morphology and phonology and its applications in language technology, supervised by Flip Droste and Gerard Kempen.
Although I was trained in the eighties “handcrafting” Artificial Intelligence tradition (using LISP programming), I already started working at the AI-Lab on machine learning approaches to language (inspired mainly by work on genetic algorithms by Goldberg and on memory-based reasoning by Stanfill and Waltz).
From 1989, I took up a lectureship in the Computational Linguistics group of the faculty for Language and Literature at Tilburg University where I founded the ILK (Induction of Linguistic Knowledge) research group a few years later, on the basis of a large grant from NWO. I ended my affiliation in Tilburg as a part-time professor of “Machine Learning and Language Technology” in 2006.
Since 1999, I am a full-time professor at the University of Antwerp (UA), teaching Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence courses and co-directing the CLiPS (previously CNTS) research center.
My current research interests are in machine learning of natural language, natural language understanding, computational stylometry, and computational psycholinguistics. I have worked on a wide range of subjects, including intelligent text processing, lexical database design, intelligent tutoring systems, speech synthesis, linguistic knowledge representation, office automation, cognitive models for language processing and acquisition, information retrieval and extraction, classifier ensemble methods, lazy learning algorithms, text analytics, computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse, etc.
Full CV (write-only, for archival purposes)
Elected Fellow of ECCAI in 2003
Research Associate TiCC, Tilburg University
Biomedical informatics research centre Antwerpen (Biomiona)
Language and Computation corner of Journal of Logic and Computation (Associate Editor); Linguistica Antverpiensia (Advisory Board); Logic Journal of the IGPL (Editorial Board); CLIN Journal (Editorial Board, Production Editor).
Previous editorial board memberships: Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning Journal, IEEE Transactions on speech and audio processing (associate editor), Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (associate editor), Journal of Machine Learning Research (Editorial Board), Research on Language and Computation ...
General Chair of EACL 2012
SIGNLL: ACL's Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning. Member Advisory board. (co-founder of the SIG and President 1999-2003). Co-founder CoNLL Conference Series with the CoNLL shared tasks.
CLIF (Computational Linguistics in Flanders). Research community on Language Technology and Computational Linguistics. (Co-initiator, member working group)
STEVIN (programme committee)
Trilateral HLT network South-Africa / Netherlands / Belgium (steering committee)
Chairman of the Advisory Board of HLT Central
Member steering committee of ESF research network NetWordS
Other involvements: Steering Committee National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM); Chairman STIL (Stichting Toepassing Inductieve Leertechnieken); International Collaborator Next Generation Localisation CSET (Dublin).
Selected previous offices and organization: Board of ECCAI, EACL nominating committee, BNVKI-board, ACL executive committee, program chair ACL-04, program chair ECML-PKDD 2008, senior PC IJCAI 2007, area chair ACL 2010, area chair ECML-PKDD 2009, Programme co-chair ESSLLI 2010 `Language and Computation', member ECML-PKDD Steering Committee, ...
Programme committee member or reviewer of numerous conferences and workshops on computational linguistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Research reviewing for EC (ERC and Framework Programs) and ESF; IWOIB, IWT (Belgium), NWO, STW, KNAW, Spinoza committee (Netherlands); NSF (US); NRF (South-Africa); Swiss NSF; ICREA (Spain); BSF (Israel-US); A*STAR (Singapore); SFI (Ireland); FWF (Austria), DFG (Germany), Uppsala University, NSERC (Canada), ...
Member PhD committees (opponent): Antwerp (3 times), Brussels (3 times), Leuven (5 times), Nijmegen (6 times), Amsterdam (3 times), Groningen (4 times), Utrecht (4 times), Tilburg (9 times), Leiden, Maastricht, Eindhoven (twice), Reading, Sydney (twice), Barcelona (3 times), Brighton, Tübingen, Dublin (twice), Växjö, Trento, Pretoria, Paris, Helsinki, Oslo, Donostia, Chennai.
Recent keynote lectures: TSD 2012, Czech Republic; CLEF-QA 2011, The Netherlands; RANLP 2009, Bulgaria; International Summer School on Embodied Language Games and Construction Grammar 2009, Italy; LSSA/SAALA/SAALT joint conference 2007, South Africa; NODALIDA 2007, Estonia; CoNLL X, 2006, USA; EsTAL 2004, Spain.