Eckhard Bick (born 16 July 1958) is a German-born

Esperantist An Esperantist ( eo, esperantisto) is a person who speaks, reads or writes Esperanto. According to the Declaration of Boulogne, a document agreed upon at the first World Esperanto Congress in 1905, an Esperantist is someone who speaks Esperanto ...

who studied

medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

but now works as a researcher in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

. 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 ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

Education

Bick obtained degrees in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

(1983),

Medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...

(1984) and

Pedagogics Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as ...

(1985) from

Bonn University The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine ...

and an M.A. in

North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also r ...

and

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

from the Institute for Linguistics at

Aarhus University Aarhus University ( da, Aarhus Universitet, abbreviated AU) is a public research university with its main campus located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Gr ...

(1994-99). Bick's dissertation project in

lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretica ...

described "Palavras", a so-called progressive level

parser 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 Lati ...

and a

dependency grammar Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesni� ...

for the

Portuguese language Portuguese ( or, in full, ) is a western Romance language of the Indo-European language family, originating in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is an official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and ...

, both based on a constraint grammar paradigm and supported by

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

-based research. The thesis analyzes Portuguese lexical morphology, morphosyntactics,

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

and

semantic parsing Semantic parsing is the task of converting a natural language utterance to a logical form: a machine-understandable representation of its meaning. Semantic parsing can thus be understood as extracting the precise meaning of an utterance. Application ...

, as well as computer-mediated learning and

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

.Eckhard Bick,
The parsing system Palavras
', 1999, Aarhus Univ. Press, 411 pp., .

Esperanto activities

With

book illustrator The illustration of manuscript books was well established in ancient times, and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript thrived in the West until the invention of printing. Other parts of the world had comparable traditions, such as the Pers ...

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

headword In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' a ...

s (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.

Linguistics career

Since 1996 Bick has led the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning project at the Institute for Language and Communication at the

University of Southern Denmark The University of Southern Denmark ( da, Syddansk Universitet, lit=South Danish University, abbr. SDU) is a university in Denmark that has campuses located in Southern Denmark and on Zealand. The university offers a number of joint programmes in ...

, where he is engaged in the design and programming of grammatical tools for the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. He also builds constraint grammars and

phrase structure grammar The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue (Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the ...

s for the VISL languages, lexical resources and annotated corpora.Eckhard Bick: VISL Project Leader
Syddansk Universitet. Retrieved 2009-07-21. Known as

Treebank In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empiri ...

s, 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

s for nine languages, including English, Portuguese, Esperanto and the

Scandinavia Scandinavia; Sámi languages: /. ( ) is a subregion#Europe, subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. In English usage, ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, ...

n languages.GramTrans Text Translation
free and commercial versions. Retrieved 2009-07-23. As a linguist, Bick researches

natural language parsing 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 Lati ...

and

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of language, study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feas ...

. Though he specializes in Portuguese and Danish, he has also developed constraint grammars for

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...

French language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...

and

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

Works

* ''Tesi, la testudo: Esperanto-Lehrbuch/intensa lernolibro'' ("Tessie the Turtle"), 1st ed. 1985, revised 3rd ed. 2006, 226 pp., . * ''Esperanto-dansk ordbog'' ("Esperanto-Danish Dictionary"), 2nd ed., 1997, Mnemo, 258 pp., . * ''The parsing system Palavras'', 1999, Aarhus Univ. Press, 411 pp., . * ''Øreakupunktur'' ("Ear Acupuncture"), 2000, Mnemo, 175 pp., . * ''Kinesisk urtemedicin: Teori og praksis'' ("Chinese Herbal Medicine: Theory and Practice"), 2001, Mnemo, 672 pp., . * ''Klassisk akupunktur'' ("Classic Acupuncture"), 2nd ed., 2002, Mnemo, 848 pp., . * ''Grammy i Klostermølleskoven: Tværsproglig sætningsanalyse for begyndere''
Grammy i Klostermølleskoven: Tværsproglig sætningsanalyse for begyndere
', 2002, Mnemo, 64 pp., . ("Grammy in the Klostermølle Forest: Cross-Linguistic Sentence Analysis for Beginners"), 2002, Mnemo, 64 pp., . * ''Portugisisk-dansk ordbog'' ("

-Danish Dictionary"), 4th ed., 2003, Mnemo, 520 pp., .

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bick, Eckhard 1958 births Living people German Esperantists Danish Esperantists Esperanto lexicographers Writers of Esperanto literature Computational linguistics researchers Linguists from Germany Linguists from Denmark Portuguese dictionaries