Jörg Tiedemann
Humanist of the day

Jörg Tiedemann

Data must be open and free, Jörg Tiedemann strongly believes, and for his purposes it should be multilingual, parallel and aligned. Learning to translate from data is fascinating but human translations carry so much more implicit linguistic information that he cannot stop collecting them. Modern language technology profits enormously from such resources but also other disciplines in the humanities enjoy working with them with growing interest. And the key to success is to make them freely available.

Jörg Tiedemann

16.1.1972, Wernigerode, Germany

PhD in Computational Linguistics 2003, Uppsala University

Professor of Language Technology 2015-, University of Helsinki
Visiting Professor 2009–2014, Uppsala University
Postdoctoral researcher 2004–2009, University of Groningen

Publications, projects and other scientific activities
Research interests:
Machine translation, multilingual text processing, question answering and information extraction

Photo: Linda Tammisto
Written by Jörg Tiedemann (Tomas Sjöblom, ed.)

In 2003, after an intensive summer school in the beautiful surroundings of Rosendal in Norway, my fellow student Lars Nygaard and I were sitting in a café to chat about our future. Here the idea of an open collection of human translations for the benefit of everyone was born and we went home with the name in mind we made up for our resource: OPUS – the Open Parallel corpUS.

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My recent research interests include discourse-oriented machine translation. One of the main shortcomings in current systems of automatic translation is the focus on local phenomena and the translations of sentences in isolation.

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My memory is short but my time at the University of Helsinki has been even shorter so far, which does not make it easy to select a special moment I remember from being here. Nevertheless, I recall a special moment that involved at least one colleague from here.

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