Manfred Pinkal (born 24 August 1949) is a German computational linguist. He is a senior professor at the

Saarland University Saarland University (german: Universität des Saarlandes, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in si ...

Education and career

Manfred Pinkal studied

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, Philosophy, German Language and Literature, and Computer Science at the

University of Bochum The Ruhr University Bochum (, ) is a public research university located in the southern hills of the central Ruhr area, Bochum, Germany. It was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany after World War II. Instruction began in ...

and

University of Stuttgart The University of Stuttgart (german: Universität Stuttgart) is a leading research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany wit ...

. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the

Research

Pinkal’s work is centered around representation and processing of natural-language meaning, both in the frameworks of

truth-conditional Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees meaning (or at least the meaning of assertions) as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associate ...

and

distributional semantics Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. T ...

, with a special focus on vagueness, ambiguity, and the interaction of meaning and context. Since 1990, he is teaching as a professor of

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 co-founder and principal investigator of two Collaborative Research Centers and founding speaker of the International Post-Graduate College “Language Technology and Cognitive Systems” of German Science Foundation (DFG). Since 2007, he has been deputy director of the Cluster of Excellenc
“Multi-Modal Computing and Interaction” (MMCI)

Awards and honors

Pinkal was the first computational linguist to win the

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (german: link=no, Förderpreis für deutsche Wissenschaftler im Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Programm der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft), in short Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to ...

. He is member of the

Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur The Academy of Sciences and Literature (german: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, AdW Mainz) is a scientific academy in Mainz, Germany. It was established in 1949 on an initiative of Alfred Döblin. The academy's goal is to s ...

at Mainz.

External links

* Webpage
Manfred Pinkal

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pinkal, Manfred Living people 1949 births Linguists from Germany Computational linguistics researchers Academic staff of Saarland University