Professor emeritus of Computational
Linguistics and former Head of Department of Linguistic Computing at the
University of Trier, has been active in research for nearly four decades. He has
worked in language studies on topics ranging from history of German literature
to linguistics of Germanic languages, with an early affinity to computational
approaches in linguistics starting in the 1960s. Most of his work since is in
quantitative linguistics and fuzzy modeling for computational semantics and
knowledge representation, with a special focus on vagueness and
underdetermination. His recent work and current interests are in questions
related to meaning constitution. These are induced by his conception of dynamic
semantics which identifies natural language meaning with the process of its
constitution in text understanding. Modeling these processes would allow their
states being identified as meaning representations of words and discourses
processed. In dynamic cognitive semantics, meaning is not a presupposition to
but a result of processing of signs and aggregated sign structures. Thus, the
study and implementation of dynamic information processing systems as models of
meaning acquisition and language understanding by man and machine becomes the
goal of this approach (computational semiotics). It is based on and assisted by
techniques of quantitative language data analysis and fuzzy modeling and
directed towards the procedural reconstruction of linguistic entities and
structures in view of simulating semiotic cognitive information processing.
After receiving his PhD (Linguistics and Philosophy) from the
Technical University RWTH Aachen in 1969, he held various appointments as
researcher and visiting professor (Technical University of Aachen, Universiteit
van Amsterdam, University GHS Essen). Following his higher doctorate (Habilitation) in 1986 at the
RWTH Aachen, he was appointed 1987 to the newly created Chair of Computational
Linguistics at the University of Trier.
He wrote two
books on quantitative
textanalysis and stylistics (1970), and on fuzzy computational semantics (1989),
published nearly 90
articles and papers, and
edited several volumes and
conference proceedings on topics in Computational Linguistics and Linguistic
Computing. As an academic teacher and researcher his
lecturing activities comprise
more than 170 lectures, papers, and talks for audiences at national academies,
universities, conferences and workshop gatherings, both in
Europe and abroad.
His memberships comprise numerous national and international scientific societies and he served as President (1989-93) of the German Society for Linguistic Computing (GLDV) and Vice-President (1990-94) of the International Society for Terminoly and Knowledge Engineering (GTW); he was Vice-Dean (1997-99) and Dean (1999-2001) of his Faculty of Languages and Literature (Fachbereich II) of the University of Trier.