Laszlo Hunyadi

Laszlo Hunyadi graduated from Lajos Kossuth University (now University of Debrecen) where he studied English and Russian linguistics and literature. After graduation he got employed at the same university, first at the Department of Russian Linguistics, later at the Department of General and Applied Linguistics. He defended his university doctoral dissertation on the topic Modern Russian lexicology and his Ph.D.-dissertation at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (A nyelvi polaritás kifejezése a magyarban [The expression of linguistic polarity in Hungarian]). He received his habilitation at the University of Debrecen with the following two lectures: Témák a számítógépes nyelvészetből [Issues in computational linguistics], and Hungarian sentence prosody and Universal Grammar. He was awarded the scientific title Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Science in 2002.

He has been working in the scientific fields of both theoretical linguistics and digital humanities. As for  theoretical linguistics his long standing interest has been generative syntax and its relation to prosody, which in the past decade grew into an interest in cognition and psychophysiology. One of his latest projects reflects this latter interest, strongly associated with humanities computing: the study of multimodal human behavior as applied to human-human and human-machine interaction. One of the results of this research is the large HuComTech corpus, that, being a highly detailed and extensively annotated database, is open to access for scientific research.

In addition to being head of the Department of General and Applied Linguistics at the University of Debrecen, he is also the founder and head of the HuComTech Cognitive Lab and he collaborates in several engineering and cognitive psychological projects.