Short bio

Language – our most important means of communication – is the subject that defines my research, my practical work and my university teaching. I have always been fascinated by analysing languages and discovering how differences in the way cultures think and act are reflected in language and how this makes intercultural exchange so exciting. As a student, I spent a year in Japan on a language course. This year had a significant influence on my personal development, but also on my research interests. Since 2012, I have been a professor at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, teaching computer science and data science at bachelor's and master's level. I really enjoy telling students about my experiences and inspiring them to take an interest in language and technology. I am a member of the doctoral committee of the Applied Computer Science Doctoral Centre and supervise several doctoral students.

Consultation hours
By arrangement

Additional functions

• Faculty Council (member, deputy)
• Doctoral Centre (Member)
• Senate Finance Committee (member, deputy)
• Senate Committee on Research and Development (Deputy Member)
• Senate Commission on Equality (voting member)
• Senate Commission on Gender Equality (spokesperson)
• Senate (member with voting rights)
• zfe member
• Senate Committee on Research and Development (voting member)

Language – our most important means of communication – is the subject that defines my research, my practical work and my university teaching. I have always been fascinated by analysing languages and discovering how differences in the way cultures think and act are reflected in language and how this makes intercultural exchange so exciting. As a student, I spent a year in Japan on a language course (and interrupted my studies to do so). This year had a significant impact on my personal development, but also on my research interests. When I returned to Bielefeld University, Prof. Dr. Metzing gave me the opportunity to put my newly acquired language skills to immediate use in a research project on the automatic generation of directions (at that time, Google Maps did not yet exist).

I was fascinated by computational linguistics. By trying to replicate linguistic phenomena, we develop a deep understanding of language and ultimately also of the thinking behind it. For my dissertation, I worked on so-called "translation mismatches" in machine translation and discovered, for example, that the extra-linguistic context is much more important for understanding in Japanese than in German. For example, the social relationship between the speaker, the addressee and third parties being talked about is directly reflected in Japanese word forms. Replicating this in machine translation requires much more than just analysing the sentence – and this problem is far from being solved. My research on Japanese grammar has always been guided by the idea of how the results can be used to support people in their communication and work. The book summarising this work was published in 2016 by CSLI Stanford under the title "Jacy: An Implemented Grammar of Japanese". Immediately after the introduction, we describe how the grammar has been applied in various projects before going into the details of the grammar itself. As a language technologist at the Berlin-based company Acrolinx Technologie, I developed grammar, spelling, style and terminology checks to help authors write good technical documentation. But here, too, the "old" issues soon resurfaced: I helped the company develop language resources for Japanese, establish contacts in Japan and set up another branch in Tokyo. I then worked on automatic pre-editing for machine translation and collaborated on a research project. Finally, I came across the topic of "easy language" – texts for people with limited language comprehension – and developed technologies to effectively support the production of these texts.

I have been a professor at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2012. Until 2024, I taught information science at bachelor's and master's level. Since the 2024/2025 winter semester, I have been working in computer science and data science. It is incredibly enjoyable to share my experiences with students and inspire them to take an interest in language and technology. From the outset, I have been involved with teaching methods in face-to-face and e-learning, in lectures, seminars and projects, and I try to develop at least one new seminar per year. In research, the topic of sentiment analysis came back on the table, which I had already dealt with in 2005 but had lost sight of again. This was also because the students showed great interest in this topic. My experience in technical documentation has proven to be a good teaching topic. Collaborations with other degree programmes (e.g. business administration, computer science and journalism) have led to research ideas and joint courses. For several years now, I have been working on the topics of recognising and combating hate speech and disinformation.