Research Projects

• Building ICT Research Capacity in Uganda NUFFIC project with 30 Ph.D. candidates in a broad range of computer and information science. Director: John Nerbonne
• Mutual Comprehenisbility of Dutch Varieties (in Dutch) De onderlinge verstaanbaarheid van taalvariëteiten in de lage landen: Linguïstische en attitudinele determinanten NWO program (Flemish-Dutch Committee) aimed at investigating the tension between dialects' distinctiveness and their comprehensibility. P.I.s: John Nerbonne and Dirk Geraerts.
• Determinants of Dialect Variation NWO program aimed at investigating dialectometrical explanations of pronunciation and syntactic variation. P.I.: John Nerbonne
• Measuring Linguistic Unity and Diversity in Europe Project sponsored by the Volkswagen Stiftung aimed at applying dialectometric (and other techniques) toward language contact. P.I. Erhard Hinrichs.
• Scratch, a project sponsored by NWO applying language processing techniques to the retrieve hand-written documents. P.I. Lambert Schomaker.
• Learning Computational Grammars, TMR Postdoc Network, applying Machine Learning to Language. Coordinator: John Nerbonne
• GLOSSER Computational Linguistics serving language learning. P.I.: John Nerbonne

Ph.D. Projects

• Çağrı Çöltekin Catching Words in a Stream of Speech: Computational Simulations of Segmenting Transcribed Child-Directed Speech 8 Dec. 2011.
• Barbara Plank Domain Adaptation for Parsing cum laude 8 Dec. 2011.
  Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord (JN was second promotor)
• Peter Nabende Applying Dynamic Bayesian Networks in Transliteration Detection and Generation 2 Dec. 2011.
  Co-promotor: Dr. Erik Tjong Kim Sang
• Jelena Prokić Families and Resemblances 29 Nov. 2010.
• Therese Leinonen. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Pronunciation in Swedish Dialects. 1 July 2010. Winner of the 2010 prize of the Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, (Royal Gustav Adolph Academy for Swedish Folk Culture) including 25,000 Swedish Kronor, awarded 6 Nov. 2010.
  Co-promotor: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens
• Tim Van de Cruys. Mining for Meaning. The Extraction of Lexico-Semantic Knowledge from Text. 24 June 2010
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Robert G. Shackleton, Jr. A Quantitative Examination of English-American Speech Relationships. 17 June 2010
  Second Promotor: Prof. William Kretzschmar, Jr.
• Geoffrey Andogah. Geographically Constrained Information Retrieval 21 May 2010
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
• Francisco Borges Parse Selection with Support Vector Learning 18 Feb 2010
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Ismail Fahmi Automatic Term and Relation Extraction for Medical Question-Answering Systems 14 May 2009
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
• Lonneke van der Plas Automatic Lexico-Semantic Acquistion for Question Answering 23 Oct. 2008
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
• Jori Mur Off-line Answer Extraction for Question Answering 23 Oct. 2008
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
• Marco René Spruit Quantitative Perspectives on Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects Amsterdam, 26 Mar. 2008
  Promotors: Hans Bennis and John Nerbonne
• Tamás Bíró Finding the Right Words: Implementing Optimality Theory with Simulated Annealing 7 Dec. 2006
  Recipient of the AVT/Anéla prize for the best linguistics dissertation in the Netherlands in 2007. See prize committee's remarks (in Dutch).
  Co-Promotors: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Dicky Gilbers
• Hideotoshi Shiraishi Topics in Nivkh Phonology 14 Sept. 2006
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Tjeerd de Graaf
• Leonoor van der Beek Topics in Corpus-Based Dutch Syntax 10 Nov. 2005
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Robbert Prins Finite-State Preprocessing for Natural Language Analysis 12 May 2005
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Begoña Villada Moirón Data-Driven Identification of Fixed Expressions and theri Modifiability 24 March 2005
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Susanne Schoof An HPSG Account of Nonfinite Verbal Complements in Latin 6 Dec. 2004
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Gerry Wakker
• Tanya Gaustad Linguistic Knowledge and Word-Sense Disambiguation 1 Nov. 2004
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Wouter Jansen Laryngeal Contrast and Phonetic Voicing: A Laboratory Phonology Approach to English, Hungarian, and Dutch 27 May 2004.
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Dicky Gilbers
  See also his summary (in Dutch) with online demo.
• Wilbert Heeringa Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Difference using Levenshtein Distance 8 Jan 2004, cum laude
  See also Related papers, etc. on exact techniques in variationist linguistics
• Stasinos Konstantopoulos Using ILP to Learn Local Linguistic Strcutures 28 Nov. 2003
• Tony Mullen An Investigation into Compositional Features and Feature Merging for Maximum Entropy-Based Parsing 22 Mar. 2002
  Co-Promotors: Dr. Rob Malouf and Dr. Miles Osborne
• Rob Koeling Dialogue-Based Disambiguation: Using Dialogue Status to Improve Speech Understanding 25 Jan. 2002
  Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
• Ivilin Stoianov Connectionist Lexical Processing 23 Mar. 2001
• Erik Tjong Kim Sang Machine Learning of Phonotactics 19 Oct. 1998
• George Welling The Prize of Neutrality : Trade Relations between Amsterdam and North America 1771-1817. A Study in Computational History 25 June 1998
  Second Promotor: Prof. Leo Noordegraaf
• Mettina Veenstra Formalizing the Minimalist Program 11 June 1998
  Co-Promotors: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Jan-Wouter Zwart