Damir Cavar: Cognitive Science Program: Indiana University Bloomington
Research interests
- I am working in linguistics for the last 15 years. My work was in the area of theoretical linguistics, as well as in corpus and computational linguistics, speech and language technology, and psycholinguistics. After my PhD I focused mainly on speech and language technologies, corpora and NLP. In 2010 my wife and I got positions at the University of Konstanz, and from there moved to Michigan, taking over the Institute for Language Information and Technology that hosted The LINGUIST List and various research projects. In 2014 we successfully relocated to Indiana University. Most of my work on language and computation is related to language-related Cognitive Science research, and as for the computational and corpus work, it at least facilitates it. My current projects include: The implementation of an LFG-parser (Lexical Functional Grammar); the implementation of a Parallel Processing Parser as described in Jackendoff’s “The Architecture of the Language Faculty”; the development of a speech corpus infrastructure and speech corpora from as many languages as possible, enough to generate not only acoustic and language models for Forced Aligners and Speech Recognizers, but also for the generation of part-of-speech tagged corpora, parsed and syntactically, semantically and pragmatically annotated corpora, see http://gorilla.linguistlist.org/about/; various other projects relating to visualization of linguistic theories, geographical mapping of language data and information, data and technologies for low-resourced and under-documented languages.
Professional Experience
- since 2016 Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Indiana University.
- since 2014 Co- Director of The LINGUIST List at Indiana University.
- 2014-2016 Associate Research Scientist, Computational Linguistics, at Indiana University.
- 2013-2014 Director of the Institute for Language Information and Technology at Eastern Michigan University.
- 2011-2014 Assistant and Associate Professor (tenured and quit 2014), Computational Linguistics, at Eastern Michigan University.
- since 2006 Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University.
- 2011 Adjunct Affiliate Researcher at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics (IHJJ).
- 2010-2011 Substituting Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at the University of Konstanz (Germany), temporary one-year professorship.
- 2009-2011 Head of the branch office of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics in Zadar (with its main institute in Zagreb)
- 2009-2010 Acting Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University in Zadar
- 2007-2008 Acting Chair of the English Department at the University in Zadar
- 2005-2011 Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University in Zadar, Linguistics Department (English Department till 2008)
- 2006-2009 Head of the department for theoretical and computational linguistics at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics in Zagreb
- 2003-2006 Director of the Computational Linguistics Program in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University
- 2003-2006 Assistant Professor of (Computational) Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University
- 2002-2003 Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University
- 2001-2002 IT Architect, Project Manager and Researcher in the Research & Innovations group of the IS-STA (Dresdner Bank AG and Allianz AG) in Frankfurt a.M. (Germany)
- 2000-2001 Researcher (PostDoc) at the Berlin-Brandenburgian Academy of Science, Project DWDS, PI: Prof.Dr. Manfred Bierwisch and Prof.Dr. Wolfgang Klein
- 2000 Researcher (PostDoc), Department of Computer Science at the Technical University in Berlin, KIT Group, Project Verbmobil
- 1999 Researcher at the University of Potsdam, Linguistics Department, in the interdisciplinary project “Formale Modelle Kognitiver Komplexität” (Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity), WP PI: Prof.Dr. Gisbert Fanselow
- 1998-1999 Researcher, Computer Science at the University in Hamburg, Natural Language Systems Group (NATS), PI: Prof.Dr. Walther von Hahn and Prof.Dr. Wolfgang Menzel, Project Verbmobil
- 1994-1998 Researcher, Berlin-Brandenburgian Academy of Science, Project RULE (Rule Learning and Rule Knowledge), PI: Prof.Dr. Jürgen Weissenborn and Prof.Dr. Angela Friederici
- 1994-1995 Researcher at the Innovationskolleg and Research Project “Formale Modelle Kognitiver Komplexität” (Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity), Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam, WP PI: Prof.Dr. Gisbert Fanselow