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

Esperantist An Esperantist () 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 and uses it for ...

who studied

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

Bonn Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

but now works as a researcher in

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

. 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 Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...

Education

Bick obtained degrees in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Culture, language and peoples * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England * ''English'', an Amish ter ...

(1983),

Medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

(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 ...

(1985) from

Bonn University The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (), is a public research university in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the () on 18 October 1818 by Frederick Will ...

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 from the Institute for Linguistics at

Aarhus University Aarhus University (, abbreviated AU) is a public research university. Its main campus is located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Group, the Guild, and Ut ...

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

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

described "Palavras", a so-called progressive level

parser Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term '' ...

and a

dependency grammar Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern Grammar, grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of Phrase structure grammar, phrase structure) and that can be traced back prima ...

for the

Portuguese language Portuguese ( or ) is a Western Romance language of the Indo-European language family originating from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tom� ...

, both based on a constraint grammar paradigm and supported by

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') 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 ...

-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 (constituenc ...

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

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. Applicat ...

, as well as computer-mediated learning and

translation Translation is the communication of the semantics, 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 English la ...

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

Esperanto activities

With book illustrator 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 (: 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'' are forms of the s ...

s (1990, 342 pp.). With an extent comparable to the classic ''Store Esperanto-Dansk Ordbog'' ("Great Esperanto-Danish Dictionary") by

Lorenz Friis Lorenz is an originally German name derived from the Roman surname Laurentius, which means "from Laurentum". Given name People with the given name Lorenz include: * Prince Lorenz of Belgium (born 1955), member of the Belgian royal family by hi ...

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 (, SDU) has campuses located in Southern Denmark and on Zealand. It offers a number of joint programmes in co-operation with the University of Flensburg and the University of Kiel. Contacts with regional indu ...

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

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

. 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 t ...

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 empi ...

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 is a subregion#Europe, subregion of northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It can sometimes also ...

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 a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''pa ...

and

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

. 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 countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

French language French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-R ...

and

Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...

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

Klostermølle Klostermølle was originally a watermill, serving the now demolished Voer Abbey once situated nearby. The mill is located at the western end of lake Mossø. In 1872, the monks' old mill — operated as a grain mill since the time of the Prot ...

skoven: Tværsproglig sætningsanalyse for begyndere''
Grammy i Klostermølleskoven: Tværsproglig sætningsanalyse for begyndere
', 2002, Mnemo, 64 pp., . ("Grammy in the

Forest: Cross-Linguistic Sentence Analysis for Beginners"), 2002, Mnemo, 64 pp., . * ''Portugisisk-dansk ordbog'' (" Portuguese-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