CV PhDs Publications

The city of Antwerp, photograph by Veerle Smedts

Walter Daelemans

Professor of Computational Linguistics
Research Director CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group

Computational linguists build computer systems that can learn and use language. The long term goal is to understand how people acquire and process language and to make computers and robots able to do the same.

Research Projects in focus

Research on Conversational Agents (Chatbots)

Research on Clinical NLP

Research on NLP for Hate Speech Detection

Overview of current and (selected) past projects

I'm directing the University of Antwerp's core facility on text mining TEXTUA. We provide help on applying text analysis tools and methods to scientists from all research areas that use text data.

Bio

A Full CV is available [pdf].

Short CV: Walter Daelemans is professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Antwerp where he directs the CLiPS computational linguistics research group. His research interests are in applying machine learning techniques to natural language processing; computational psycholinguistics (modeling how people acquire and use language); computational stylometry, with a focus on authorship attribution and author profiling from text; and language technology applications, for example biomedical information extraction, cybersecurity systems for social networks, and conversational agents using large language models.

Some background: 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 Radboud University in Nijmegen in Gerard Kempen’s group, which was pioneering language technology in The Netherlands at the time. After military service at the Royal Military School in Brussels, I worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Luc Steels, where I was responsible for an ESPRIT project on office automation. In 1987 I finished my Ph.D. (University of Leuven) on an object-oriented computer 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). This led to work on Memory-Based Language Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2005), an exemplar-based approach to NLP and Computational Psycholinguistics with Antal van den Bosch, Steven Gillis, and others. 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 (UAntwerp), teaching Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence courses and directing the Computational Linguistics group of the CLiPS (previously CNTS) research center.

More information:

Affiliations and Awards

Teaching

Overview of current teaching.

Editorial Boards

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Editorial Board); CLIN Journal (Editorial Board, co-Editor-in-Chief); Language and Computation corner of Journal of Logic and Computation (Associate Editor); Logic Journal of the IGPL (Editorial Board)

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, Research on Language and Computation (associate editor) Computational Cognitive Science (managing editor), Linguistica Antverpiensia (advisory board), Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (action editor), ACL Rolling Reviews (action editor)

Organization and Scientific Advice

NCC for Belgium in the ELG project.

Member international advisory board Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society (WASP-HS).

ACL Nominating Committee.

Member advisory board SIGDAT, ACL's Special Interest Group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP.

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.

Chairman STIL (Stichting Toepassing Inductieve Leertechnieken).

Co-founder of Textkernel and of Textgain

Selected previous service: Chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) and member of the EACL Nominating Committee; President of META-TRUST; Steering Committee Trilateral HLT network South-Africa / Netherlands / Belgium; General Chair EACL Conference 2012; Program chair EMNLP 2014; Program chair ESSLLI 2010, area chair 2022; Program chair ECML-PKDD 2008; Program chair ACL 2004; program committee member of the STEVIN HLT resources development program ...

Contact

Postal Address: Prinsstraat 13, B-2000, Antwerpen, Belgium
E-mail: walter.daelemans@uantwerpen.be
Visiting: Lange Winkelstraat 40, Antwerpen, 2nd floor, L-203

Last modified: Tue Aug 1 21:39:03 CEST 2023