Before their formal appointment, all professors at the University of Helsinki give a public inaugural lecture. The lecture provides an overview of the major issues of the discipline and is aimed at both the academic community and the general public.
Jörg Tiedemann, the new Professor of Language Technology, will give his inaugural lecture on Wednesday 2 December 2015.
His lecture is a part of the Inaugural Ceremony in the Great Hall starting at 4.00 p.m. The title of the lecture is Recycling Data – The Amazing Utility of Human Translations in Language Technology.
Event programme (pdf)
Bio
Jörg Tiedemann was born on January 16, 1972 in the small town of Ilsenburg in the heart of Germany. He studied computer science at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg from which he received a ”Diplom für Informatik” in 1997. During his undergraduate studies, he spent one year at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, Colorado.
His master’s thesis on the automatic extraction of lexical knowledge from bilingual corpora, which was written during a one-year-visit at Uppsala University in Sweden, paved his way into computational linguistics. He returned to Uppsala after finishing his degree in Magdeburg and started to work as a research assistant at the Department of Linguistics. In 2000, he started his doctoral research at the same department under the supervision of Prof. Anna Sågvall Hein. During that time, he stayed at the University of Edinburgh for one academic year in 2001/2002 before receiving his PhD in Computational Linguistics in 2003 from Uppsala University.
After a short period as university lecturer and program coordinator of the BA programme for language technology at Uppsala University, Tiedemann joined the University of Groningen in The Netherlands in 2004 where he stayed for 5 years as post-doctoral research fellow working on question answering and information retrieval. In 2009, he returned to Uppsala for an appointment as visiting professor in computational linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, which he held until 2014. In 2015, he worked as a senior research fellow at the same department before moving to Helsinki for the current appointment.
Tiedemann has worked on a number of national and international projects on machine translation, bitext alignment, question answering and information extraction. Since 2004, Tiedemann maintains the World’s largest collection of freely available parallel corpora, OPUS, which is a widely used resource for machine translation, multilingual lexicography and terminology, and translation studies. His recent research interests include discourse-oriented statistical machine translation and the projection of linguistic information across languages. He has published over 100 refereed scientific articles including a text book on bitext alignment and released various well-known open source tools and data resources.
Doctor of Philosophy Jörg Tiedemann was appointed Professor of Language Technology from 1 August 2015.
