Eckhard Bick (born 16 July 1958) is a German-born Esperantist who studied medicine in Bonn but now works as a researcher in computational linguistics. He was active in an Esperanto youth group in Bonn and in the Germana Esperanto-Junularo, a nationwide Esperanto youth federation. Since his marriage to a Danish woman he and his family live in Denmark.
Bick obtained degrees in English (1983), Medicine (1984) and Pedagogics (1985) from Bonn University and an M.A. in North Germanic languages and Portuguese from the Institute for Linguistics at Aarhus University (1994-99). Bick's dissertation project in lexicography described "Palavras", a so-called progressive level parser and a dependency grammar for the Portuguese language, both based on a constraint grammar paradigm and supported by corpus-based research. The thesis analyzes Portuguese lexical morphology, morphosyntactics, syntax, semantics and semantic parsing, as well as computer-mediated learning and translation. [1]
With book illustrator Uta Hasekamp, he is co-author of Tesi, la testudo, a German-language Esperanto primer. He has translated books, songs and plays into Esperanto, and has published various Esperanto games. He is also author of an extensive Esperanto-Danish dictionary with about 35,000 headwords (1990, 342 pp.). With an extent comparable to the classic Store Esperanto-Dansk Ordbog ("Great Esperanto-Danish Dictionary") by Lorenz Friis and Peter Frey (three editions published in 1938, 1953 and 1969, with about 31,000 headwords), Bick's dictionary is more up-to-date and is today the leading dictionary of its type.
Since 1996 Bick has led the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning project at the Institute for Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, where he is engaged in the design and programming of grammatical tools for the Internet. He also builds constraint grammars and phrase structure grammars for the VISL languages, lexical resources and annotated corpora. [2] Known as Treebanks, these corpora include a grammatical analysis for each word; his VISL team has generated such manually revised language data for 27 languages and, in cooperation with GrammarSoft, which is commercializing the technology, developed rule-based taggers and parsers for nine languages, including English, Portuguese, Esperanto and the Scandinavian languages. [3]
As a linguist, Bick researches natural language parsing and corpus linguistics. Though he specializes in Portuguese and Danish, he has also developed constraint grammars for English, Spanish, French language and Esperanto. [2]
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Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural rules on speakers' or writers' usage and creation of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to conscious attention when ambiguity impairs clarity of communication, given the pervasive polysemy in natural language. In computational linguistics, it is an open problem that affects other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference.
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the sign. It uses a uniform formalism and is organized in a modular way which makes it attractive for natural language processing.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.
Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, most often referred to as N. F. S. Grundtvig, was a Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician. He was one of the most influential people in Danish history, as his philosophy gave rise to a new form of nationalism in the last half of the 19th century. It was steeped in the national literature and supported by deep spirituality.
Sandro Nielsen is a Danish metalexicographer, Associate Professor at Centre for Lexicography at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark, from where he received his PhD in 1992. Nielsen has contributed to lexicography as a theoretical and practical lexicographer with particular reference to bilingual and multilingual specialised dictionaries. He is the author and co-author of more than one hundred publications on lexicography, theoretical papers, printed and electronic (online) dictionaries.
Scanian is a Scandinavian speech variety spoken in the province of Scania in southern Sweden.
Jens Christian Svabo was a pioneering Faroese linguist, scholar, and ethnographer. Svabo was born in Miðvágur, Vágar, the Faroe Islands to a minister and his wife. Svabo studied history, music, and theology in Miðvágur and later in Tórshavn. Between 1765 and 1800 he lived in Denmark and studied music there, especially the violin. In 1800, he returned to Tórshavn and lived in a house known as the Pætursarstova: it was in the attic of this home that in 1928 a book of songs written by Svabo was found. This manuscript is now part of the collection of the Føroya Landsbókasavn.
Apertium is a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform. It is free software and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Constraint grammar (CG) is a methodological paradigm for natural language processing (NLP). Linguist-written, context-dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags ("readings") to words or other tokens in running text. Typical tags address lemmatisation, inflexion, derivation, syntactic function, dependency, valency, case roles, semantic type etc. Each rule either adds, removes, selects or replaces a tag or a set of grammatical tags in a given sentence context. Context conditions can be linked to any tag or tag set of any word anywhere in the sentence, either locally or globally. Context conditions in the same rule may be linked, i.e. conditioned upon each other, negated, or blocked by interfering words or tags. Typical CGs consist of thousands of rules, that are applied set-wise in progressive steps, covering ever more advanced levels of analysis. Within each level, safe rules are used before heuristic rules, and no rule is allowed to remove the last reading of a given kind, thus providing a high degree of robustness.
A foreign language writing aid is a computer program or any other instrument that assists a non-native language user in writing decently in their target language. Assistive operations can be classified into two categories: on-the-fly prompts and post-writing checks. Assisted aspects of writing include: lexical, syntactic, lexical semantic and idiomatic expression transfer, etc. Different types of foreign language writing aids include automated proofreading applications, text corpora, dictionaries, translation aids and orthography aids.
A stochastic grammar is a grammar framework with a probabilistic notion of grammaticality:
The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.
Danish Sign Language is the sign language used in Denmark.
Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt was a German/Danish missionary linguist born in Greenland known for having written extensively about the Greenlandic language and having invented the orthography used for writing this language from 1851 to 1973. He also translated parts of the Bible into Greenlandic.
Valeriu Munteanu was a Romanian philologist, lexicographer, and translator.
Theodor Arnold (1683–1771) was a German Anglicist from Leipzig, at the time a part of the Electorate of Saxony. He was a professor at the University of Leipzig and published numerous English grammars, dictionaries, and translations for German and Danish readers. His works were among the most popular for English-language learning in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A word sketch is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. Word sketches were first introduced by the British corpus linguist Adam Kilgarriff and exploited within the Sketch Engine corpus management system. They are an extension of the general collocation concept used in corpus linguistics in that they group collocations according to particular grammatical relations. The collocation candidates in a word sketch are sorted either by their frequency or using a lexicographic association score like Dice, T-score or MI-score.
