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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.
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 PietschTelephone number, email address and room number are listed here.
Universität Bielefeld
CITEC
PF 10 01 31
33501 Bielefeld
Germany
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.