Walter Daelemans

Walter Daelemans is professor of Computational Linguistics at the CLiPS (Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics) research centre of the University of Antwerp. He helped pioneer the statistical and machine learning revolution in Natural Language Processing in the mid-nineties in Europe with the development of Memory-Based Language Processing and with work on the methodology of machine learning for language processing. He has published widely on text mining and knowledge extraction from biomedical, clinical, and social media text, and on stylometry and author profiling. Recently, he was involved in research on the development of Conversational Agents (chatbots) using Large Language Models (LLMs). He currently has supervised 36 finished PhDs (and 11 ongoing). He is co-founder and was president of SIGNLL (the special interest group for computational language learning of the International Association for Computational Linguistics), and he was chair of the European Association for Computational Linguistics. His honours include elected fellowships from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EUrAI) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and membership of KANTL (Royal Academy Dutch Language and Literature). He also is a core PI in the Flanders AI Research programme where he coordinates the work package on NLP, focused on Conversational Agents.