Piek Vossen
Prof. Dr. Piek Th.J.M. Vossen (1960, the Netherlands), is Professor of Computational Lexicology at the Faculty of Arts, department Language, Cognition and Communication (LCC) at the VU University Amsterdam; Head of the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL); Member of the Management Team of CAMeRA (the Interfaculty research institute of Sociology, Computer Science, Clininal Psychology and Language & Communcation) and Founder and President of the Global WordNet Assocation.
After graduating from the University of Amsterdam in Dutch and General Linguistics with subsidiaries Cognitive Psychology and Language Philosophy (specializations: Lexical Semantics, Computational Linguistics and Computational Lexicology), he received his PhD (cum laude) on "Grammatical and Conceptual Individuation in the Lexicon" in Linguistics on Computational Lexicology and Lexicography.
He coordinated many (inter)national (EU-)projects: Links, Acquilex-I and II, Sift, EuroWordNet I and II, Meaning, Euroterm, Balkanet and Pidgin, Cornetto, DutchSemCor, Arabic WordNet, Text to Politics, Semantics of History, and KYOTO.
For many years he combined his academic career with his work as a:
- Senior Manager at Sail Labs, Antwerp/Belgium: a long-term research laboratory developing language technology of the future and responsible for developing novel technologies and strategies with core technologies: cross-lingual information retrieval, classification, semantic ontologies and wordnet, disambiguation, corpus-based tuning and tailoring of resources and application (1999–2001) and as a
- C.T.O. of Irion Technologies B.V., where he developed multilingual language technology for many different languages. The technology combined state-of-the-art statistical engines developed at TNO with intelligent language modules. It used a rich semantic network for 7 languages that is unique in the world, which made it possible to develop concept-based information and knowledge management systems. Main products were: a cross-lingual concept-based search engine, a document classification system, and a question-answer system. All products are available for English, Dutch, German, French, Italian and Spanish (2001–2009).
Vossen is involved in further standardisation initiatives, such as the EAGLES/ILSE project, FLaReNet and Global WordNet Grid. He served as an expert consultant for many projects such as: "Van Dale Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal", "Corpus Gesproken Nederlands" en "Referentie Bestand Nederlands". He was also a member of the NWO-IMIX (Interactieve Multimodale Informatie Extractie)-program and the STEVIN (Spraak-en Taaltechnologische Essentiele Voorzieningen In het Nederlands)-Program from the Nederlandse Taalunie, NWO, AWI, and the FWO and IWT.
He is a consulant for the Nederlandse TaalUnie to revise the Referentie Bestand Nederlands as well as a member of the National Advisory Panel of CLARIN-NL, a member of FLaReNet, a member of the Advisory Board of the Taalbank Nederlands (GTB) of the Institute of Dutch Lexicography (INL) and an Expert Consultant for the EC.
Since 2000, he is Founder and President of the Global WordNet Association: a free, public and non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting wordnets for all languages in the world. In this function he organized the First Global Wordnet Conference (India, 2002), the Second Global Wordnet Conference (Czech Republic, 2004), the Third Global Wordnet Conference (Korea, 2006), the Fourth Global Wordnet Conference (Hungary, 2008), the Fifth Global Wordnet Conference (India, 2010) and the 6th Global Wordnet Conference (Japan, 2012).
Vossen has more than 200 (peer reviewed) publications in national and international journals, conference proceedings and (hand)books. He has given invited lectures at several conferences and other occasions, is a regular referee for (inter)national conferences and journals, and has served on several program committees and organizing committees of workshops and conferences. He also serves as a member of PhD-committees, in the Netherlands as well as abroad and wrote several chapters in prominent Handbooks in the fields of Ontologies, Linguistics, Language, Lexicography etc.
His research interests are WordNets, Computational Lexicon, Ontologies, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology and Computer-Applications. Research on wordnets and computational lexicons, both within a single language and from a multilingual perspective. Vossen is interested in the relation between lexicons and ontologies, from a theoretical point of view as well as from their usage in computer applications in which meaning and interpretation play a role. He sees the lexicon as a fundamental resource to anchor meaning and interpretation in useful computer behaviour. Computer behaviour can make use of communicative models and insights from communication science. The organization of the lexicon and the knowledge stored in it ne
After graduating from the University of Amsterdam in Dutch and General Linguistics with subsidiaries Cognitive Psychology and Language Philosophy (specializations: Lexical Semantics, Computational Linguistics and Computational Lexicology), he received his PhD (cum laude) on "Grammatical and Conceptual Individuation in the Lexicon" in Linguistics on Computational Lexicology and Lexicography.
He coordinated many (inter)national (EU-)projects: Links, Acquilex-I and II, Sift, EuroWordNet I and II, Meaning, Euroterm, Balkanet and Pidgin, Cornetto, DutchSemCor, Arabic WordNet, Text to Politics, Semantics of History, and KYOTO.
For many years he combined his academic career with his work as a:
- Senior Manager at Sail Labs, Antwerp/Belgium: a long-term research laboratory developing language technology of the future and responsible for developing novel technologies and strategies with core technologies: cross-lingual information retrieval, classification, semantic ontologies and wordnet, disambiguation, corpus-based tuning and tailoring of resources and application (1999–2001) and as a
- C.T.O. of Irion Technologies B.V., where he developed multilingual language technology for many different languages. The technology combined state-of-the-art statistical engines developed at TNO with intelligent language modules. It used a rich semantic network for 7 languages that is unique in the world, which made it possible to develop concept-based information and knowledge management systems. Main products were: a cross-lingual concept-based search engine, a document classification system, and a question-answer system. All products are available for English, Dutch, German, French, Italian and Spanish (2001–2009).
Vossen is involved in further standardisation initiatives, such as the EAGLES/ILSE project, FLaReNet and Global WordNet Grid. He served as an expert consultant for many projects such as: "Van Dale Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal", "Corpus Gesproken Nederlands" en "Referentie Bestand Nederlands". He was also a member of the NWO-IMIX (Interactieve Multimodale Informatie Extractie)-program and the STEVIN (Spraak-en Taaltechnologische Essentiele Voorzieningen In het Nederlands)-Program from the Nederlandse Taalunie, NWO, AWI, and the FWO and IWT.
He is a consulant for the Nederlandse TaalUnie to revise the Referentie Bestand Nederlands as well as a member of the National Advisory Panel of CLARIN-NL, a member of FLaReNet, a member of the Advisory Board of the Taalbank Nederlands (GTB) of the Institute of Dutch Lexicography (INL) and an Expert Consultant for the EC.
Since 2000, he is Founder and President of the Global WordNet Association: a free, public and non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting wordnets for all languages in the world. In this function he organized the First Global Wordnet Conference (India, 2002), the Second Global Wordnet Conference (Czech Republic, 2004), the Third Global Wordnet Conference (Korea, 2006), the Fourth Global Wordnet Conference (Hungary, 2008), the Fifth Global Wordnet Conference (India, 2010) and the 6th Global Wordnet Conference (Japan, 2012).
Vossen has more than 200 (peer reviewed) publications in national and international journals, conference proceedings and (hand)books. He has given invited lectures at several conferences and other occasions, is a regular referee for (inter)national conferences and journals, and has served on several program committees and organizing committees of workshops and conferences. He also serves as a member of PhD-committees, in the Netherlands as well as abroad and wrote several chapters in prominent Handbooks in the fields of Ontologies, Linguistics, Language, Lexicography etc.
His research interests are WordNets, Computational Lexicon, Ontologies, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology and Computer-Applications. Research on wordnets and computational lexicons, both within a single language and from a multilingual perspective. Vossen is interested in the relation between lexicons and ontologies, from a theoretical point of view as well as from their usage in computer applications in which meaning and interpretation play a role. He sees the lexicon as a fundamental resource to anchor meaning and interpretation in useful computer behaviour. Computer behaviour can make use of communicative models and insights from communication science. The organization of the lexicon and the knowledge stored in it ne
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Papers by Piek Vossen
Timeline Extraction is a complex task composed by a set of subtasks: named entity recognition, event detection and classification, coreference resolution of entities and events, event factuality, temporal expression recognition and normalization, and extraction of temporal relations. The VUA-Timeline system has been developed as an additional module of the NewsReader NLP pipeline, which consists of tools which provide state-of-the-art results carrying out the subtasks mentioned above. The output of this pipeline is a rich representation including events, their participants, coreference relations, temporal and causal relations and links to external references such as DBpedia. We extract cross-document timelines concerning specific entities in two steps. First, we identify timelines within documents, selecting events that involve the entity in question and filtering out events that are speculative. These events are placed on a timeline based on normalized temporal indications (if present) and explicit temporal relations. In the second step, we merge document specific timelines to one cross-document timeline by applying cross-document event coreference and comparing normalized times.