Gerhard Heyer

Gerhard Heyer is full professor at the computer science department of Leipzig University. He has studied Mathematical Logic and Philosophy at Cambridge University (Philosophy Tripos, Christ’s College 1973-1976, Robert-Birley Scholarship), and General Linguistics at the University of the Ruhr, where he received his Ph.D. in 1983. After research on AI based natural language processing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with support by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation (Feodor-Lynen Scholarship) he has been working as a systems specialist and manager in the software industry and a company of his own that was one of the first to develop a translation memory system.

His field of research is focussed on automatic semantic processing of natural language text. In addition to numerous publications on this topic – including the German text-book „Text Mining: Wissensrohstoff Text“ (W3L-Verlag, 32011, revised edition scheduled for December 2020 at Springer Campus) –  he has also been conducting several research projects. Worth mentioning are in particular his contributions to the research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences CLARIN-D, the joint work with GESIS on the DFG-funded interactive Leipzig Corpus Miner (http://ilcm.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/), and the application of machine learning for OCR and HTR (DFG-Verbundprojekt OCR-D, Koordinierte Förderinitiative zur Weiterentwicklung von Verfahren für die Optical-Character-Recognition).

Prof. Heyer is a member of the academic senate of Leipzig University, a member of the council for digitization at the Saxonian Ministry for Economics, Labour and Infrastructure, as well as advisor to the executive board of the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI), an adjunct institute of Leipzig University. He has also served as a member of the scientific advisory council of the GESIS Institute IZ from 1997 until 2006, and was a member of the GESIS Kuratorium from 2006 to 2007.