32.3411, Featured Linguist: Stefan Muller

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3411. Fri Oct 29 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3411, Featured Linguist: Stefan Muller

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Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2021 13:36:57
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Stefan Muller

 
I am delighted to support this year's fund drive for the LINGUIST List.

While preparing this text, I had a look at the pieces from previously featured
linguists and noticed
that I share some characteristics with Adele Goldberg and Colin Phillips: we
all had a passion for
mathematics. I was a member of the Mathematische Schülergesellschaft (MSG) run
by researchers from
the Humboldt University from the fifth grade onwards. When I was 13, I applied
to the Heinrich Hertz
Oberschule, which is a school with a specialization in mathematics (nine hours
of math each
week). Back then two to four pupils out of 30 could go to the Extended
Secondary School and getting
a place on this special school was even more competitive. There were two
tests: a math examination,
which I finished with 100%, and a political talk, which I failed. They asked
me whether I would want
to serve in the army for an extended period of time (three years instead of
one and a half), and I
told them that I never thought about this question but that I thought it was a
bad idea. Since the
GDR expected loyalty of those who were allowed to these extended schools and
those who were allowed
to study, I was rejected. I am very grateful to my parents who left no stone
unturned in order to
get me into this school. They got certificates from my math teacher and from
the MSG, and I had a
second chance interview on political issues with the principal of my school. I
told them that it was
my deepest wish to serve in the army for three years (sarcasm).

My application having been successful, I went to the Heinrich Hertz school,
and it was great. Lots
of math and even computer science. We could learn to program using
programmable pocket calculators
from Texas Instruments (note that GDR money could not buy you those, so the
school must have had
some special connections), and later using the first home computers produced
in the GDR
(KC85-1). The school organized a partnership for individual pupils with the
Humboldt University. I
could work in the main computing facility of the HU. I was very privileged:
while university
students had to use punch cards at the time (1985), I could type in my
programs at the terminal of
the HU's main computer. This mainframe had 128k of memory and an electronic
typewriter typing out
important messages. Clack, clack, clack. (/dev/console)

After this happy childhood with mathematics and mainframes, I had to serve in
the army. I hated every
minute of it; it was the darkest period of my life. I went to the library in
the town where I was
stationed and got a book by Kurt Schwitters: "Anna Blume und andere". Kurt
Schwitters is one of the
proponents of Dada (an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early
20th century) and this
was the right kind of craziness for me. I knew immediately: either I write
crazy stuff like this or
I will really go crazy. So I went for Dada. I published my stuff together with
a friend who did
illustrations in a Samizdat, an underground self-publication, using army
computers and printers. I
wrote the publishing and layout software myself, a precursor to what I would
do later in life.
 
Finally released from the army, I began to study at the Humboldt University. I
studied Mathematical
Computer Science, a brand-new subject, which was a full-scale math curriculum
with computer science
on top. I started in September 1989, when GDR still existed. The elections on
March 7th of that year
were fake, and people left the country in masses via Hungary and
Czechoslovakia. The situation
culminated on October the 7th, which was the 40th anniversary of the
foundation of GDR but also one
of the days on which the opposition kept reminding the government of the fake
elections which had
taken place on another 7th day of a month. Protesters and celebrators mixed,
and riot police with
helmets and water guns were in the streets: something that had never happened
before. Secret service
members mixed with the crowd and tried to stop discussions, arresting many of
the protesters. The
outcome of all this is known. There was a huge demonstration in November and
things began to change
slowly. A world collapsed and something new began. I was deeply disappointed
by the faculty members:
they just continued to talk about algebra, analysis, and logic as if nothing
was happening. They
completely ignored the outside world. Their math was dead. It worked as it
always did, it was
correct, but it was boring. I could not connect to them any longer. I wanted
something different,
something dirty, something that is not perfect: language. One thing the
Dadaists did in the 1920s
was anagrams. They made anagrams with pencil, paper, and scissors. Being a
nerd, I went for more
systematic and efficient methods: I used a computer. We learned Prolog in the
computer science
lectures, and so I used Prolog to permute the letters, and a dictionary to
then test the
permutations against word sequences. Of course arbitrary word sequences were
not good enough; I
wanted to filter out all those sequences that are naturally occurring phrases.
So I wrote my first
grammar of German.

Udo Kruschwitz, a friend of mine, had the idea to go to Great Britain for a
year. We checked
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and some other places, and decided to apply for Edinburgh
since they did not
require a language test. My English was terrible at the time, but as far as
computer science
lectures were concerned, I did not have any problems. As so often in my life,
I was lucky: Edinburgh
was a hot spot of computational linguistics. Chris Mellish, the pope of
parsing and Prolog, was
there. Alan Black did computational semantics. Henry Thomson did formal
linguistic stuff. It was
just great. It was an international mix of students, including David Adger,
and it was really
inspiring with a lot of fruitful interaction. The year abroad ended with a
Large Practical in which
we used Prolog for syntactic and semantic analysis of English. I did a
PATR-like grammar with a
Discourse Representation Semantics component.

When I came back, the courses I did in Edinburgh were accepted so that I could
finish my study in
four years including the year abroad. The original plan for my diploma was to
develop a grammar and
a processing system that incorporated the ideas about verb fields by Jürgen
Kunze (Professor for
Computational Linguistics at the Humboldt University back then). This theory
is a very cool theory
since it uses semantic primitives like `cause', `become', and `have' to model
the verbs of exchange
of possession (`give', `take', `steal', `lend', `borrow'). Kunze modeled the
field in German: 91
verbs. A 92nd verb would have been expected, so he discovered a lexical gap in
German.

But, back in Edinburgh, I had visited one of my supervisors. There was a copy
of the first volume of
Pollard & Sag about Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) on his desk. I
asked him what this
was about, and he said: "Oh, this is too difficult for you." I knew how to
work with Definite Clause
Grammars, but I also felt that a bit more than this would be required for my
diploma thesis. So I
had a look into Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) and developed a
parser for a fragment of
German. I compiled out all phrase structure rules, and the result got so messy
and dealing with the
grammar got so complicated that I decided that HPSG could hardly be more
complicated than what I was
already doing. So I turned to the forbidden book, and I loved it. I also got
an ESSLLI booklet from
1992 with a draft version of the '94 HPSG book. I read the books several
times. I developed an HPSG
grammar of German and a parser for it. Sometime in December 1993, Kunze said
that there was a
position I could take. He asked what I had done so far for my diploma and
decided that this was
enough. So I never got to his cool semantics but was deeply involved with
HPSG.

Kunze was coming from the Academy of Science of the GDR, which was closed down
after the end of the
GDR. A lot of scientists from GDR universities or other research institutions
became unemployed
(half of the 218,000 researchers in GDR, two thirds of the professors). But
there was also a program
called Wissenschaftlerintegrationsprogramm (researcher integration program).
The idea was to give
three-year contracts to East Germans so that they could find their place in
the West German academic
system (or rather in the German academic system). There was money in the pool
for Kunze's position,
but since he got a professorship, this money was not needed. He used it,
together with other money,
to create a position, which I was lucky to get. This was a huge privilege,
since it was a personal
position with a personal travel budget of 10,000 Deutschmarks, and I was
freshly graduated, not
taken over from an existing GDR institution. I used the time well to extend
the HPSG Grammar and
improve the parser. By the end of the three-year period, I had the largest
grammar of German
available and the fastest system for processing it. As Wolfgang Wahlster, one
reviewer of my PhD
thesis, remarked: It was better than what IBM came up with, with a research
group working on grammar
and parser and a 1 Mio DM budget. But when I presented my work to the computer
scientists of the
Humboldt University, they did not really like it. I guess I made a mistake in
presenting the stuff;
they were not interested in the grammar part at all. So, rather than trying to
convince them that
computational linguistics is interesting and that I had something that is
worth a PhD, I looked for
different options, and so Hans Uszkoreit and Wolfgang Wahlster became my PhD
reviewers. I defended
the PhD at the computer science department in Saarbrücken. I also got a job
there at the DFKI
(German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) in the Computational
Linguistics (CL) lab of
Hans Uszkoreit, working in the VerbMobil project. The goal of VerbMobil was
speaker-independent
machine translation of spoken language. Nowadays every phone can do this, but
CL was far away from
this goal in 1992, when VerbMobil started. The project was way too big, as far
as the number of
involved people was concerned. Wolfgang Whalster counted 911 people (including
student
assistants). Many complained that communication was difficult, but for me the
VerbMobil time was
just great. Again, I was lucky: everybody who was directly before or after me
in the processing
pipeline was in my lab. There were Uli Krieger and Bernd Kiefer, responsible
for parsing, and Walter
Kasper, with whom I interacted closely since he did the semantics for my
grammar. If something was
wrong with the output format or the semantic representation, they got the
message from other groups
and we dealt with the problems internally.

After defending my PhD, I wanted to give a conference talk based on the
chapter about particle verbs
in my thesis. The reviewers did not like it. I felt hurt and misunderstood. I
decided to write
something bigger, maybe a journal article. Particle verbs are complex
predicates. They form a
predicate complex similar to verbal complexes and resultative constructions
with adjectives. In
order to write this up properly, I had to talk about secondary predication
(depictives and
resultatives), about copula constructions, and about verbal complexes. All
these phenomena interact
with fronting, passivization and so on. I realized quickly that I had to write
a book. This became
my habilitation. Another lucky coincidence in my life.

VerbMobil ended in 2000, but this was the time of internet startups and the
DFKI was involved with
several of them. One was Interprice (now Semantic Edge), a platform for price
comparison with a
natural language interface. The domain was later changed to travel. I
continued to develop the
German grammar for these domains and was responsible for other languages too.
In 2001 I got the
offer to replace the chair for computational linguistics in Jena for two
years.

When this time was over, I was lucky again and got an assistant professorship
for Theoretical
Linguistics/Computational Linguistics in Bremen. After a year in Potsdam,
filling in a position in
CL, I got my first permanent position at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2007.
This position was
in German and General Linguistics, and while my focus had been on German in
previous years, I now
started projects on Danish, Persian and Mandarin Chinese. I developed
computer-processable HPSG
grammars for German, Danish, Persian, Mandarin, English, Yiddish, Spanish,
French, Maltese and
Hindi. All grammars come with syntax and semantics, and some with an
information structure component
which was developed in the Collaborative Research Center 632. The grammars
share a common core
grammar, that is, constraints that hold for all (examined) languages or for
subgroups of them. In
2016, I moved to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I have had a chair
in German Syntax since
then. We started another Collaborative Research Center there (CRC 1412). It
deals with register
phenomena. My lab contributes a project dealing with the empirical side
(corpus linguistics) and
with questions on how to pair HPSG with probabilistic aspects.

Throughout my life I spent a lot of time comparing various theoretical
frameworks. Most energy went
into the lexical vs. phrasal constructions discussion (basically phrasal
Construction Grammar
vs. HPSG/SBCG/Categorial Grammar/Minimalism) and I really enjoyed working
together with Steve
Wechsler on a target article, but there are also other comparisons like the
ones of HPSG and
Minimalism as well as HPSG and Dependency Grammar. In general, I think that
linguistic frameworks share a
lot of ideas, and we should talk more to each other to be able to understand
the commonalities and
work together across framework boundaries.

The Linguist List has been important to me throughout my scientific life. It
played a role in
scientific exchange (I remember the challenge to the Minimalist community to
build a parser showing
that Minimalist ideas can be made consistent and working. 

https://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1156/

The resulting discussion was very interesting...), the job postings were very
important, and one
early post by Martin Haspelmath (in 2004!!!) to the list about open access
turned out to be one
cornerstone in the foundation of Language Science Press.

https://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2354/

During a dinner in 2012 with Adele Goldberg, Thomas Herbst and Anatol
Stefanowitsch, we realized
that the tools for running a scholarly-owned open access publishing house were
now available. I
started writing to scholars asking for signing at a website for support. I
remembered the post from
Martin and asked him if he wanted to join the enterprise. We met at the Freie
Universität Berlin,
talked things through, wrote a DFG proposal, founded Language Science Press,
and the rest is
history. (Part of this history, and an important one, is Sebastian Nordhoff,
who worked for Martin
and later joined Language Science Press. Without him and his social and
technical skills, the great
success of this initiative would not have been possible.)

The organizers of this year's fund drive of the Linguist List gave us a motto
for our piece: silver
lining. We all need one, after over a year of Covid, which has been exhausting
and terrible for
everybody in academia (and beyond). And this is not the only crisis we are in.
The climate crisis is
something that is not waiting for us at the end of the pandemic. It is
something that is happening
simultaneously and on top of everything we already have. I have been active
with Scientists 4 Future
for several years now. Martina Schäfer, Gisbert Fanselow and I started an
initiative for flying
less, and we collected signatures of people who pledge to refrain from
business flights to
destinations less than 1000km away. 25% of the scientific staff of the
Humboldt University
signed. Given the fact that 50% of the carbon emissions of universities is due
to travel, and 93% of
this is due to air travel, this was a good result. However, we are far from
zero carbon emissions,
and we have to go down to zero. There is not much time left (as the most
recent report of the IPCC
made clear again).

So, where is the silver lining? Well, maybe it is not easy to see it in all
the smoke coming from
the fires in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. But once the smoke
clears, we may be able to
see that Covid brought us one thing: we learned to live without traveling.
Search committees, job
talks, conferences are possible without intercontinental flights. The tools we
are using are not
perfect, and I experienced disasters in communication which I was very unhappy
about, but we can
improve on this and learn how the online world works. Since we must go down to
zero emissions rather
quickly, it was good that we've now learned, at least in principle, how to do
it.







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