Welcome

  

I joined the Department of Linguistics of the University of Tübingen in Summer 2008 as a Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and head of the Theoretical Computational Linguistics group.

  

Check out the web page of my ICALL Research Group for an overview of our work in that area. A short recent interview on the potential of technology for supporting language teaching and learning can be found here. To learn more about two recent start-ups I am a mentor for, check out cabuu and Prosodiya.

  

My work currently focuses on four broad areas:

  

• I. the use and advancement of linguistic modeling and insight in:
  • - ICALL: Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Interact4School, DiDi, KANSAS, FeedBook, FLAIR, TAGARELA)
  • - Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition, Language Teaching and Testing (MERLIN, Kobalt-DaF)
  • - content assessment: automatic meaning comparison in authentic task contexts (CoMiC, SFB 833/A4)
  • - annotation, correction, and use of linguistic corpus annotation (LangBank, DECCA)
  
  
• II. the interface of Computational Linguistics and Empirical Educational Science, with a focus on
  • - enhancing our understanding of Second Language Acquisition, (cf. Special Issue of Language Learning)
  • - effective teaching and learning methods, and
  • - analyzing language in educational science
  
  I serve on the Steering Board of the Excellence Initiative LEAD Graduate School and Research Network and head the Language Intersection 4 there. I'm also on the Steering Committee of the Heritage Language Consortium and a consultant on the EFCAMDAT project.
  
  
• III. the division of labor of syntax and information structure, aimed at exploring context-based explanations for restrictions traditionally considered syntactic constraints. This includes corpus-based empirical research and explicit and formal analysis in a constraint-based HPSG architecture.
  
  
• IV. teaching CL and linguistics in a way that combines current technology and research insights with the fundamentals of the field. Together with Chris Brew and Markus Dickinson, we wrote "Language and Computers", a book intended for a non-specialist audience, published October 2012 by Wiley-Blackwell.
  
  

From 2013 to 2016, I also was a member of the Department of Language and Linguistics at the Universitet i Tromsø, Norway as a Professor II to collaborate on ICALL research with the Giellatekno group. From 2008 to 2010, I served two years as head of department of linguistics at the University of Tübingen. From 2005 to 2008, I was an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics, where we built the Computational Linguistics group at The Ohio State University, after working there as an Assistant Professor since 2001. From 1997 to 2000, I was a Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where I had worked as a full time researcher in the SFB 340 since 1995.

  

I received my MA degree in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Psychology from the University of Tübingen in 1994, and my PhD in Computational Linguistics there in 2000. During my studies, I enjoyed a year as an exchange student with an ERASMUS grant at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique (IRIT) at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse in France.

  

An event I co-organized is the CALICO-09 Workshop on Automatic Analysis of Learner Language (AALL'09), which follows up on the AALL'08 workshop and the Special Issue of the CALICO journal on this topic. The events build on the Interfaces of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (IICALL) workshop I organized in 2006. I also taught a course on ICALL: An emerging interdisciplinary field at ESSLLI 2009 in Bordeaux and an updated version of the course at the Summer School in Bilingualism 2012 at Bangor University.

  

Some newspaper articles related to our work: Spiegel Online on the complexity of language in school books (20.11.2017), Stutgarter Zeitung and Stuttgarter Nachrichten on linguistics in computational linguistic applications (10.11.2017), and language learning apps (16. August 2017). An interview "In conversation with ... Detmar Meurers" recorded by Lancaster University, with a focus on corpus linguistics, is available here: Part 1 and Part 2.

  

For more detail on papers, projects, etc. check out the CV information in cv-meurers.pdf (updated: September 2019).