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Piek Vossen

Professor of Computational Lexicology at VU University Amsterdam

Prof. Dr. Vossen is Professor of Computational Lexicology at the VU University Amsterdam, Head of the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL) and co-founder of the Global WordNet Assocation in 2000 (GWA). In 2013 he won the prestigious Spinoza Award of the Dutch Research Counsil (NWO) and in 2015 he has been honoured by the Dutch Royal House as a “Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion”. He is also a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) and the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW).

Piek Vossen studied Dutch and General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and received his PhD (cum laude) in Linguistics on Computational Lexicology and Lexicography. He is/has been involved in the many national and international projects, among which: Acquilex, EuroWordNet, Meaning, Cornetto, DutchSemCor, KYOTO and GlobalWordNetGrid.

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.