Heyer, Gerhard

Gerhard Heyer 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 within the Olivetti Group for establishing TA Triumph Adler's activities on research and development in electronic publishing and natural language processing.

Since April 1994, Gerhard Heyer holds the chair on Automatic Language Processing at the computer science department of the University of Leipzig. His field of research is focussed on automatic semantic processing of natural language text with applications in the area of information retrieval and search as well as knowledge management and eHumanities.  He has served as a member of the scientific advisory council of the GESIS Institute IZ from 1997 until 2006, and also was a member of the GESIS Kuratorium from 2006 to 2007. Presently he heads a number of eHumanities projects at the University of Leipzig, including the BMBF fundet ePol and eTraces. He also is head of the CLARIN-D center at Leipzig University and member of the German CLARIN-D steering committee.