Eckhard Bick
Encyclopedia
Eckhard Bick is a German-
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

born Esperantist
Esperantist
An Esperantist is a person who speaks or uses Esperanto. Etymologically, an Esperantist is someone who hopes...

 who studied medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 in Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

 but now works as a researcher in computational linguistics
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

. He was active in an Esperanto youth group in Bonn and in the Germana Esperanto-Junularo, a nationwide Esperanto youth federation. Since his marriage to a Danish woman he and his family live in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

.

Education

Bick obtained degrees in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 (1983), Medicine
Medicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 (1984) and Pedagogics (1985) from Bonn University and an M.A. in Nordic languages and Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 from the Institute for Linguistics at Aarhus University (1994-99). Bick's dissertation project in lexicography
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....

 described "Palavras", a so-called progressive level parser
Parsing
In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...

 and a dependency grammar
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar is a class of modern syntactic theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency grammars are distinct from phrase structure grammars , since they lack phrasal nodes. Structure is determined by...

 for the Portuguese language
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, both based on a constraint grammar
Constraint Grammar
Constraint Grammar is a methodological paradigm for Natural language processing . Linguist-written, context dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags to words or other tokens in running text...

 paradigm and supported by corpus
Text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...

-based research. The thesis analyzes Portuguese lexical morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, morphosyntactics
Syntactic category
A syntactic category is either a phrasal category, such as noun phrase or verb phrase, which can be decomposed into smaller syntactic categories, or a lexical category, such as noun or verb, which cannot be further decomposed....

, syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

, semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 and semantic parsing, as well as computer-mediated learning
Computer-supported collaborative learning
Computer-supported collaborative learning is a pedagogical approach wherein learning takes place via social interaction using a computer or through the Internet. This kind of learning is characterized by the sharing and construction of knowledge among participants using technology as their primary...

 and translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...

.

Esperanto activities

With book illustrator
Illustration
An illustration is a displayed visualization form presented as a drawing, painting, photograph or other work of art that is created to elucidate or dictate sensual information by providing a visual representation graphically.- Early history :The earliest forms of illustration were prehistoric...

 Uta Hasekamp, he is co-author of Tesi, la testudo, a German-language Esperanto primer. He has translated books, songs and plays into Esperanto, and has published various Esperanto games. He is also author of an extensive Esperanto-Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

 dictionary with about 35,000 headwords (1990, 342 pp.). With an extent comparable to the classic Store Esperanto-Dansk Ordbog ("Great Esperanto-Danish Dictionary") by Lorenz Friis and Peter Frey (three editions published in 1938, 1953 and 1969, with about 31,000 headwords), Bick's dictionary is more up-to-date and is today the leading dictionary of its type.

Linguistics career

Since 1996 Bick has led the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning project at the Institute for Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark
University of Southern Denmark
The University of Southern Denmark, with campuses located in the southwestern part of Denmark - i.e. Funen, Southern Jutland and Sealand - is a research and educational institution with deep regional roots and an international outlook. Reaching even further south, the university offers a number of...

, where he is engaged in the design and programming of grammatical tools for the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. He also builds constraint grammar
Constraint Grammar
Constraint Grammar is a methodological paradigm for Natural language processing . Linguist-written, context dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags to words or other tokens in running text...

s and phrase structure grammar
Phrase structure grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammars as defined by phrase structure rules, i.e. rewrite rules of the type studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue...

s for the VISL languages, lexical resources and annotated corpora. Known as Treebank
Treebank
A treebank or parsed corpus is a text corpus in which each sentence has been parsed, i.e. annotated with syntactic structure. Syntactic structure is commonly represented as a tree structure, hence the name Treebank...

s, these corpora include a grammatical analysis for each word; his VISL team has generated such manually revised language data for 27 languages and, in cooperation with GrammarSoft, which is commercializing the technology, developed rule-based tagger
Tagger
Tagger may refer to:* a method for doing part-of-speech tagging, or grammatical tagging, for example Brill tagger* Tag editor, software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats* A position in Australian rules football...

s and parsers for nine languages, including English, Portuguese, Esperanto and the Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

n languages.

As a linguist, Bick researches natural language parsing
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

 and corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...

. Though he specializes in Portuguese and Danish, he has also develeoped constraint grammar
Constraint Grammar
Constraint Grammar is a methodological paradigm for Natural language processing . Linguist-written, context dependent rules are compiled into a grammar that assigns grammatical tags to words or other tokens in running text...

s for English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, French language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...

.

Works

  • Tesi, la testudo: Esperanto-Lehrbuch/intensa lernolibro ("Tessie the Turtle"), 1st ed. 1985, revised 3rd ed. 2006, 226 pp., ISBN 3-922570-80-6.
  • Esperanto-dansk ordbog ("Esperanto-Danish Dictionary"), 2nd ed., 1997, Mnemo, 258 pp., ISBN 87-89621-05-0.
  • The parsing system Palavras, 1999, Aarhus Univ. Press, 411 pp., ISBN 87-72889-10-8.
  • Øreakupunktur ("Ear Acupuncture"), 2000, Mnemo, 175 pp., ISBN 87-89621-08-1.
  • Kinesisk urtemedicin: Teori og praksis ("Chinese Herbal Medicine: Theory and Practice"), 2001, Mnemo, 672 pp., ISBN ISBN 87-89621-09-8.
  • Klassisk akupunktur ("Classic Acupuncture"), 2nd ed., 2002, Mnemo, 848 pp., ISBN 87-89621-11-1.
  • Grammy i Klostermølle
    Klostermølle
    Klostermølle was originally a watermill for Voer Abbey, which had been at the same place at the end of a lake called Mossø.In 1872 the monks' old mill — operated as a grain mill since the time of the Protestant Reformation — was converted to a sawmill. The wood waste also served as...

    skoven: Tværsproglig sætningsanalyse for begyndere
    ("Grammy in the Klostermølle
    Klostermølle
    Klostermølle was originally a watermill for Voer Abbey, which had been at the same place at the end of a lake called Mossø.In 1872 the monks' old mill — operated as a grain mill since the time of the Protestant Reformation — was converted to a sawmill. The wood waste also served as...

     Forest: Cross-Linguistic Sentence Analysis for Beginners"), 2002, Mnemo, 64 pp., ISBN 87-89621-12-8.
  • Portugisisk-dansk ordbog ("Portuguese
    Portuguese language
    Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

    -Danish Dictionary"), 4th ed., 2003, Mnemo, 520 pp., ISBN 87-89621-13-5.
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