Biography / Other information
Gerhard Heyer is Professor Emeritus of Natural Language Processing at the Computer Science Department of Leipzig University. Before working at the university, he worked as systems specialist and head of research and development in industry and a company of his own. His research focuses on research data infrastructures, automatic semantic processing of text, and applications of text mining in the digital humanities, among others. His book on text mining (new edition 2022) is the German standard textbook on this current topic. He is the PI at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in charge of the NFDI project Text+ and represents the academy in the National Research Data Infrastructure NFDI.
Curriculum Vitae
Gerhard Heyer studied philosophy, mathematical logic and linguistics at the Universities of Cambridge (M.A.1980) and Bochum (Dr.phil. 1983). He then spent a year researching natural language processing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA), as Visiting Assistant Professor and Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
For many years, he worked as a systems specialist and head of research and development tasks on language and multimedia products in industry and a company of his own, which developed one of the first translation memory systems. He was appointed professor at the University of Leipzig in 1994 as one of the first professors of Natural Language Processing in a Computer Science Department. The chair's fundamental research approach has always been a data driven approach and a close connection between data and algorithms.
Committees
Prof. Heyer is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards and co-opted on the board of directors of the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI), an affiliate institute of the University of Leipzig that he co-founded in 2006. From 2016 to 2021 and from 2022 to 2024 he was a member of the advisory board on Digital Value Creation of the Saxonian Ministry of Economics and Labour (SMWA). From 1997 to 2006 he was a member of the scientific advisory board of the Information Science Centre (IZ) in the GESIS network, and from 2006 to 2007 he was also a member of the GESIS Board of Trustees. Since 2015 he also is a member of the scientific advisory board of the saxonian Sorbian Institute.
Main Areas of Research
Based on a close connection between data and algorithms, one focus of his research work is the establishment and operation of research data infrastructures for the text-oriented humanities and social sciences, as they are being developed in the NFDI project Text+ (cf. https://text-plus.org/en/). The basis of his work at SAW is the text ressource project Deutscher Wortschatz, which is one of the most comprehensive lexical resources for German and many other languages (https://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/en). On the algorithmic side, his research focuses on automatic semantic processing of text. In addition to numerous publications on this topic – including the German-language text mining textbook "Text Mining: Wissensrohstoff Text" (W3L-Verlag, 32011, revision by Springer Campus 2022) – he has also carried out a large number of research projects in this area. Noteworthy recent projects include the generation of small, efficient, domain-specific language models (CORAL, https://coral-nlp.github.io/index_en.html), and the use of language model-based methods in legal and journalistic applications (e.g. https://www.mfrr.eu/monitor/).
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