33.2651, All: Obituary: Christian Rohrer (1938-2022)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2651. Wed Aug 31 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2651, All: Obituary: Christian Rohrer (1938-2022)

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Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2022 21:56:40
From: Jonas Kuhn [jonas.kuhn at ims.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: Obituary: Christian Rohrer (1938-2022)

 
The Institute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart,
Germany, commemorates its founder
                    Prof. Dr. Christian Rohrer,
who passed away on July 29, 2022, aged 84.  The research community loses one
of its greatest pioneers. Without his visionary strategic actions over many
decades, the multifaceted landscape between linguistics and computer science,
characterized by a strong spirit of cooperation, would not have developed in
the same way.

Christian Rohrer, born in 1938, studied Romance linguistics in Geneva,
Tübingen, and Paris in the early 1960s and received his doctorate in Tübingen
in 1965. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Texas at Austin in
1965-1966, he earned his Habilitation in Tübingen. As soon as 1969, in his
early 30s, he was appointed full professor at the Institute for Linguistics of
the University of Stuttgart.
Early on, he recognized the potential that precisely specified formalisms and
computer-implemented algorithms bear for the empirical validation of models of
grammatical competence and meaning construction. Rohrer's work in formal
semantics of French and German and its computational implementation, as well
as his research on Machine Translation led to the remarkable situation in 1986
that he, as the head of an institute for language studies, prevailed in an
external application for a chair in computational linguistics. In the course
of the negotiations with the University of Stuttgart resulting from the
external offer, Rohrer’s request was granted to establish a new Institute for
Natural Language Processing comprising four chairs. Rohrer stayed loyal to
"the IMS", until his retirement in 2006 and far beyond, continuing to shape
the research landscape between linguistics, computational linguistics and
computer science through manifold collaborations. Most notably, he chaired the
Collaborative Research Center 340 "Linguistic Foundations for Computational
Linguistics", run jointly between Stuttgart and Tübingen 1989-2000, and was a
member of the founding consortium of the Parallel Grammar Development Project
ParGram in 1994, dedicated to broad-coverage grammar development across
languages using the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism. 

Beyond his specific research achievements, Rohrer shaped several generations
of (computational) linguists in their scholarly self-understanding. A basic
insight was that, with the high specialization of sub-disciplines that had
developed by the 1960s, further advances in our understanding of the
interleaved cognitive abilities underlying language are best achieved through
cross-disciplinary collaboration. Rohrer's concept for the IMS relied on a
pluralism of methodological approaches; wherever possible, the expertise from
different sub-disciplines should be combined. Everyone who met Rohrer knows he
embodied the conciliatory spirit that such an approach presupposes like no-one
else — coupled with an incredible enthusiasm for cracking linguistic
challenges. Moreover, Rohrer always conveyed that the status hierarchy played
no role in academic discussions, only scientific interest in the content. In
the same vein, it was a matter of course for him to promote and encourage
early-career researchers by assigning them competencies for responsible,
independent action. This certainly contributed to the fact that a considerable
number of IMS students, PhDs and postdocs went on to take over responsible
positions inside and outside of academia.

As emeritus professor, Christian Rohrer continued to bike to IMS on a regular
basis and continued the academic exchange for many years, before his illness
unfortunately put an end to this. Now the news of his death makes us aware of
the irretrievability of enthusiastic discussions with him on language
processing and fills us with sadness, but at the same time with deep gratitude
for all that he achieved for himself and the research community in a fulfilled
life as a researcher.
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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