27.4104, All: Obituary: in Rememberance of Peter Bosch

Thu Oct 13 14:43:13 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4104. Thu Oct 13 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4104, All: Obituary: in Rememberance of Peter Bosch

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Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 10:43:01
From: Carla Umbach [umbach at zas.gwz-berlin.de]
Subject: Obituary: in Rememberance of Peter Bosch

Peter Bosch, Professor of Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science at
the University of Osnabrück, died suddenly on September 24 of a heart attack.
He had celebrated his 67th birthday some weeks before and intended to teach
for another year and then continue his research projects as a senior in
Cologne. He is survived by his wife Prof. Anke Lüdeling and two adult
children. 

Peter Bosch studied Linguistics and Philosophy in Berlin and Oxford. He
completed his MA at the Technical University Berlin in 1974 and his Dr. Phil.
at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 1980 (supervised by Helmut Schnelle).
Between 1975 and 1988 he had teaching and research positions at the University
of Nijmegen and the University of Tilburg, as well as visiting appointments at
Oxford, Harvard, Brussels and Cologne. From 1988 to 2000 he was a manager in
research, development, and services at IBM Germany in Heidelberg and, from
1994 on, the Director of the Institute for Logic and Linguistics at the
Scientific Centre of IBM Germany. In 2000, he became Full Professor of
Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of
Osnabrück.

Peter started his studies in Literature but found out quickly that his real
interest was in linguistics and, beyond, in Natural Language Processing and
Artificial Intelligence. As early as 1971 he participated in an informal
seminar discussing Terry Winograd's dissertation and, in passing, learned LISP
programming (which required some determination since courses in programming
were reserved for electrical engineers). When he moved to Oxford for a year
his focus of studies shifted to Philosophy of Language and Logic. He seized
the opportunity to attend lectures by renowned philosophers, in particular
Peter Strawson, who introduced him to the problem of presupposition. In a
later stay, he also got in contact with W.V.O. Quine, which resulted in a
translation of From a logical point of view into German plus an epilogue on
synonymy in context by Peter, which was published 1979 by Ullstein publishers.

As a result of this experience, already in his MA thesis on contextual
prerequisites for text understanding, Peter was able to combine linguistic
accounts with logic, and model interpretation processes from a Natural
Language Processing perspective. His dissertation on ''Agreement and Anaphora
- A Study of the Modes of Pronominal Reference and Their Constraints'' was one
of the earliest pieces of evidence that such an approach can lead to results
that surpass by far those that can be achieved by taking the standard
approaches. It was published 1983 in the then novel Cognitive Science series
of Academic Press and is still one of the standard references in this field.
The topic of anaphora remained one of Peter's favorite areas of research.
Actually, one of the projects left by his sudden death is on reference and
binding of demonstrative pronouns in German.

Peter Bosch's professional career began in 1975 at the University of Nijmegen,
where he taught philosophy of language sharing the office with Rob van der
Sandt.  Although occupied with teaching and administrative duties, Peter still
found time to get in contact with the newly founded psycholinguistics group at
the Max Planck Institute, which led him back to topics in Natural Language
Processing and Artificial Intelligence. When in 1985 Leo Noordman was
appointed a professor in Tilburg with a decidedly interdisciplinary focus and
asked him to join, he readily agreed. That pushed his interests more and more
in the direction of computational linguistics and discourse and put him in
contact with industrial research. A position at IBM Germany’s Scientific
Center then offered him the opportunity to develop systems going beyond the
limits of toy implementations.  From 1994 on Peter was the Director of the
Institute for Logic and Linguistics at the IBM Scientific Center, with
considerable influence on the make-up of computational linguistics projects
and cooperation with university groups. The most important one was the LILOG
project on text understanding and knowledge representation, which spawned many
important research results in linguistics and logic, and the number of
computational linguists in Germany who were in some or the other way affected
by or involved in LILOG activities is hard to overestimate. Towards the end of
the 1990s, even though the Center was still highly successful in combining
scientific and business-oriented objectives, IBM gradually cut back their
financial commitment to it. 

In 2000, Peter, who was determined to continue his research agenda, accepted a
position as a Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Cognitive
Science at the University of Osnabrück. He played a significant role in the
foundation of the Osnabrück Institute of Cognitive Science shortly after his
arrival with groups in Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, and
Artificial Intelligence. At the same time the Osnabrück Cognitive Science
study program was launched, offering Bachelor’s, Master’s  and PhD degrees,
which was unique in Germany then (and even now). The program received a number
of awards, including grants for teaching and scholarship. The PhD program was
Peter's key interest. He made it into a focal point of the institute's
interdisciplinary research and a place where new ideas were explored.

Against the cognitive science background Peter developed theories of
context-dependence, definiteness and demonstrative pronouns documented in a
number of influential publications. One key aspect of these papers is the
empirical evidence they provide. Long before it was considered essential in
the linguistic community, Peter insisted that linguistic research must be
empirically based. And instead of passing the burden of experimental studies
to students and research assistants he acquired whatever competence was needed
for himself.

Even though he never lost sight of cognitive science, Peter was a genuine
semanticist who focused on core linguistic issues, like the productivity and
adaptivity of language. He was a reliable constant in the semantic landscape,
as a supervisor, as a project partner, as a reviewer and not least as managing
editor of the Journal of Semantics for many years. He was a good advisor in
matters of research and beyond. He was what one calls in German ein
unabhängiger Geist (‘an independent mind') and he was a critically-minded
scientist in an old-fashioned way, with no concern for short-term success and
with high standards for scientific quality, particularly in his own work. We
will miss him.

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

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