About
Martin Volk is a Full Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich, with a dual affiliation to the Department of Informatics since 2019. He holds a PhD from the University of Koblenz and has held academic positions at institutions including Stockholm University (part-time from 2008-2011), Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and the University of Georgia. His research focuses on grammar engineering, machine translation evaluation, multilingual text analysis, and cross-language information retrieval.
Education:
- Born in Cochem, Germany
- Studied Computer Science and Computational Linguistics at EWH University, Koblenz
- Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia (Fulbright Scholar)
- PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Koblenz
Research Interests:
His work emphasizes data-driven NLP methods, including corpus-based approaches, parsing technologies, and the application of machine learning to historical and multilingual texts. Key focuses include:
- Machine translation systems and evaluation frameworks
- Grammar testing environments (e.g., GTU)
- OCR and digitization of historical documents (e.g., Gothic script)
- Development of parallel corpora for linguistic research
Projects:
- SMULTRON: Multilingual parallel treebank project
- Bullinger Digital: Historical document digitization initiative
- Text+Berg: Digital Humanities project for alpine textual heritage
- EU-funded MuchMore (cross-language medical IR)
Grants & Collaborations:
Recipient of grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, EU projects, and industry partnerships (e.g., Siemens, Xerox). His work integrates academic and industrial perspectives in NLP tool development.
Labs & Teams:
Leads research teams in the Institute of Computational Linguistics at UZH, focusing on projects like the Zurich Parallel Corpus Collection and MODERN (modeling discourse for MT).
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