Christian Pietsch

CITEC – Center of Excellence in Cognitive Interaction Technology
+LiLi – Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies

Since 3 March 2008 I have worked as a researcher at the “Center of Excellence” in Cognitive Interaction Technology.

Concurrently, I have been a PhD student first with Prof. Dr. Gerhard Jäger (initially Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Bielefeld University; since summer 2009 Professor of General Linguistics at Tübingen University) and then with Prof. Dr. Jan Peter de Ruiter who is the chair of psycholinguistics at Bielefeld University.

Since March 2009, I have also been affiliated with Dr.-Ing. Stefan Kopp's Sociable Agents Group which is where my office is located now.

A computational linguist by training, my current main interest is putting linguistic theories to the empirical test. Most of my studies are based on linguistic data collections, usually text corpora.

While my background is in NLG (natural language generation) and unification grammars, I have recently broadened my horizon towards construction grammar, the (short-term) emergence of grammar, logical grammar, data-oriented parsing, latent semantic analyis, corpus linguistics and machine learning.

In 2010, Prof. Jan Peter de Ruiter and I started a new CITEC research project called, The role of syntactic priming in dialogue. Stay tuned for more!

More practically, I am also involved in building a CITEC dialogue demonstrator system featuring the embodied conversational agent (ECA) Vince which is being developed in the Sociable Agents Group.

In the summer semester 2010, I teach the seminar Verfahren zur Repräsentation und Verarbeitung multimodaler Dokumente (Creating and processing multi-modal documents) for students in the linguistics Masters course with a specialisation in discourse modelling.

For facts about my past, please take a look at my old home pages at the Open University where I worked in Donia Scott's NLG group, or at Saarland University where I took a degree called Diplom-Linguist (something like a Master's) in computational linguistics. I grew up in Mühlhausen/Thüringen.

I have contributed to the following research projects: MedWis/KBS-DIAMET, VerbMobil-2, SmartKom, Project HALO, Semantic Mining (aka Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine), CLEF-Services (Clinical E-Science Framework), and UNITIVES (full title: Routinization: What are the cognitive building blocks of syntactic structure?), in chronological order.

Buch, A., and Pietsch, C. (2010). Measuring Syntactic Priming in Dialog Corpora. Presented at the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence 2010: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives. Tübingen, February 2010.
Power, R. and Pietsch, C. (accepted). Editing Medical Data Records with a Natural Language Interface. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM), Singapore, 6–7 December 2007. [.bib]
Burek, G., Pietsch, C. and De Roeck, A. (2007). SVO triple based Latent Semantic Analysis for recognising textual entailment. Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing (WTEP) of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007). 28–29 June 2007, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 113–118. [.bib] [.pdf]
Mancini, C., Pietsch, C., and Scott, D. (2007). Visualising Discourse Structure in Interactive Documents. Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG). 17–20 June 2007, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, pp. 89–92. [.bib] [.pdf]
Pietsch, C. (2006). Internet as Corpus. Chapter 10 of: Åhlfeldt, H., Borin, L., Daumke, P., Grabar, N., Hallett, C., Hardcastle, D., Kokkinakis, D., Mancini, C., Markó, K., Merkel, M., Pietsch, C., Power, R., Scott, D., Silvervarg, A., Toporowska Gronostaj, M., Williams, S., Willis, A. (2006). Literature review on patient-friendly documentation systems Technical Report 2006/04. Computing Department, The Open University (ISSN 1744-1986), pp. 92–98. [abstract] [BibTeX entry: .bib ] [BibTeX file with all references: .bib] [.pdf]

I am a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), taking an active role in SIGGEN (Special Interest Group in Natural Languagen Generation; student Board member 2009–2010) and SIGSEM (Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics; webmaster since 2007). At the same time, I happen to be a member of the mysterious Evolutionary Linguistics Association.

As a service to the natural language generation community (and as an experiment with Semantic MediaWiki), I host and maintain the NLG Wiki which currently contains the new version of the Bateman/Zock List of NLG Systems. Please contribute!

In my spare time, I am concerned about civil rights in the digital age. Why? Because I live in a country full of terrorists, my government said.

Address:

Christian Pietsch
Universität Bielefeld
CITEC
PF 10 01 31
33501 Bielefeld
Germany

Telephone number, email address and room number are listed here.

To bookmark my current homepage, please use this permanent URL: http://purl.org/net/pietsch/. In the EU, young researchers tend to lead a nomadic life.