Mans Hulden (

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

Måns Huldén) is a researcher in computational linguistics currently holding the title of ''Assistant Professor'' at the Department of Linguistics of the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado syst ...

. He teaches courses in computational linguistics, phonology, and phonetics, and is the creator and maintainer of the

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

finite-state toolkit

Foma Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access (FOMA) is the brand name of the W-CDMA-based 3G telecommunications services being offered by the Japanese telecommunications service provider NTT DoCoMo. It is an implementation of the Universal Mobile Tel ...

. Before moving to the University of Colorado in 2014, he was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Helsinki, and an Ikerbasque visiting professor in Computer Science at the

University of the Basque Country The University of the Basque Country ( eu, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, ''EHU''; es, Universidad del País Vasco, ''UPV''; UPV/EHU) is a Spanish public university of the Basque Autonomous Community. Heir of the University of Bilbao, initially ...

. Prior to that, Hulden received his PhD in Linguistics from the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

in 2009, and did postdoctoral work in Helsinki as a Marie Curie Fellow. His research focuses on modelling and learning natural language structure, particularly in the domains of morphology and phonology. He often employs and develops formal and machine learning methods to this end. Dr. Hulden has worked extensively with linguistic applications of finite-state technology, modeling of linguistic theory, grammatical inference, and the development of language resources. He is the author of several open-source tools for finite-state language modeling.

Foma (software)

Hulden was the creator of the Foma tool that works with

automata An automaton (; plural: automata or automatons) is a relatively self-operating machine, or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions.Automaton – Definition and More ...

and

transducers A transducer is a device that converts energy from one form to another. Usually a transducer converts a signal in one form of energy to a signal in another. Transducers are often employed at the boundaries of automation, measurement, and contro ...

. Foma consists of a

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

, a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

, and a

C library The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.ISO/IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it was ...

. Writing a set of rules in a special format, Foma converts them into finite-state transducers and automata. Its implementation is highly efficient, and it is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

. Foma is a tool for working on computational morphology, but is equally useful in any other type of finite-state applications. As free software, Foma has contributed decisively to the creation of an effective spellchecker for the Basque language (Xuxen). Hulden did this in collaboration with the Basque researcher Iñaki Alegría. Xuxen rules and lexicons were already implemented with the XFST program, but XFST was not free software. Redefined with Foma in 2011, the Xuxen corrector could be fully integrated into free-distribution programs, hence Foma's importance for the Basque language. Subsequently, Alegria and Hulden have collaborated on the standardisation of ancient texts in Basque.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Linguists from the United States University of Colorado Boulder faculty University of Arizona alumni Computational linguistics researchers {{US-linguist-stub