'My interest in computational linguistics was started by my study of traditional linguistics. I saw a whole world of questions and problems. Language, thinking, intelligence. How do we do it? Why do we do it this way? The issues seem so obvious (like in the old joke: 'Language? It's easy, even small children can use it'), and then you learn that nobody had yet come up with any good answers. It sparked my imagination.
'For my master's thesis I made a translator, although it wasn't meant as a real translator; rather as an illustration of the theories and problems I was writing about. The dictionary was very poor and the grammar wasn't sophisticated enough. You couldn't translate very much with it.
'I'm still interested in language and linguistics, although my main focus drifted in a different direction in the meantime. After all, if you are a PhD student, you can't do everything you're interested in, you must complete your thesis. But for me computational linguistics is just a way of talking about language using computers as a metaphor, so there is no real, philosophical gap between 'both' linguistics.
'At this moment I am investigating how beliefs influence multimodal communication, which is communication that involves many channels for passing the message: anything from speech, gesture, and facial expressions to video sequences. To programme the computer to make any decision we must give it some knowledge about the environment of the decision, about the beliefs of the participants. When we play poker, for instance, we would like to know what are the probabilities of various card distributions, but also: what are the personalities of the other players; what does it mean when one of them smiles and doubles the stakes? If I do the same, how will they react?
'We are working on developing 'agents': computer programmes that can make decisions, and act accordingly. It can be a computer programme placed on a web page: trying to talk to you, detect your preferences, make you interested by showing the pictures you may like ... and finally sell you something you didn't originally plan to buy.'
