Prof. Dr. P.Th.J.M. (Piek) Vossen (1960) is fullat the ĢƵ, Head of the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (), co-founder and co-president of the Global WordNet Assocation () and Dean of Research of the of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam).
In 2013 he won the prestigiousof the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research () and in 2015 hehas been honoured by the Dutch Royal House as a “”. He is also a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen () in three domains and a member of theKoninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen ().
Piek Vossen studied Dutch and General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and received his(cum laude) in Linguistics on Computational Lexicology and Lexicography. He is/has been involved in the many national and international projects, among which:,,,,,and . His Europeanproject developed the ‘History Recorder’, a computer program that ‘reads’ the news each day and precisely records what happened when and where in the world and who was involved. Furthermore he developed 5 research projects with the Spinoza-price: “– an escape from the world of language”. He coordinates the project "", and the follow-up project "" (2020-2024), the NWO project and the NWO"" project (2020-2024). He is also Principal Investigator of the (2020-2030).
For many years he combined his academic career with his work in the industry. He worked at Sail Labs (1999-2001) and as a C.T.O. of Irion Technologies B.V. (2001-2009), where he developed multilingual language technology for many different languages, such as cross-lingual semantic search, text classification, and natural-language dialogue systems.
Vossen published more than 300in national and international journals, conference proceedings, book chapters and (hand)books. He has given more than 200 invitedat several conferences and other occasions, is a regular organizer of and referee forand journals, and has served on many scientific, advisory and program. He also serves as a member of PhD-committees in the Netherlands as well as abroad. In 2014 he won the2013.
He is an invited member of severaland institutes, such as theEuropean Language Resources Association (), the Centraal Planbureau, the,Events Advisory Board of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), SURFSara, the(3); he also serves as an expert reviewer for the European Union.
His research interests are WordNets, Computational Lexicon, Ontologies, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology and Computer-Applications, 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 need to take that usage as a starting point. He combines linguistics and computer science to model understanding of natural language texts by computers.
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