Bio

I was educated in mathematics, computer science and languages. My PhD degree is in General Linguistics (summa cum laude) and I obtained it from the University of Vienna where I have carried out research for over 20 years.  

Since 2019, I have researched natural language processing without grammar, initially with n-grams and now with tokens, as used in Large Language Models. In 2021, I claimed and showed that syntactic trees used for formal representation of language in linguistics research, the so-called Chomsky's approach, are not hierarchical structures and have an unnatural direction of growth: from leaves to the root, the paper has over 5000 downloads only on LingBuzz. Since then, Noam Chomsky, Matilde Marcolli and Robert Berwick have been looking for new representations of syntactic structures and thus confirmed the correctness of my claims, their LingBuzz papers can be accessed here. 

So far, my projects have been supported by: Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austrian National Bank (OeNB), Erste Bank (Die Erste) - Vienna, Mayor of Vienna, University of Vienna, European Science Foundation (ESF), SNS Pisa (Italy), Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, Junta de Andalucía (Spain), and private sponsors.

Besides linguistics, I love math and coding. My favorite mathematician is Carl Friedrich Gauss and I have referred to his ideas for solving problems in morphology and syntax, see these papers: 1, 2, 3. I am also interested in algorithms, data structures, programming languages and complexity measuring, specifically in how to adapt the Big O notation for measuring the complexity of linguistic analyses carried out within different frameworks, i.e. I believe that complexity in both computer science and linguistics is not a property of data but of analysis, and CF Gauss's work is, actually, the best illustration of this claim, see this presentation. 

In 2023, I started the preparation of Gauss:AI.