Hans C. Boas, Project Director
Hans is a Professor for Germanic Linguistics at UT Austin. His areas of interest include computational lexicography, documentation and preservation of endangered languages and dialects, syntax, lexical semantics, morphology, and contrastive linguistics. From January 1999 until August 2001 Hans worked with the FrameNet team at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. During this time he became interested in creating a FrameNet database for German. Since September 2001, Hans has also been involved in documenting and analyzing Texas German, a rapidly eroding German dialect spoken in central Texas (see www.tgdp.org).
Email: hcb@mail.utexas.edu
Home page: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/hcb/
Oliver Czulo
Oliver currently holds a full professorship for Translation Ttudies at the Univeristy of Leipzig, Germany. Before that he was an Assistant Professor ("Juniorprofessor") for Translation-relevant Linguistics at the University of Mainz, Germany. He attended Saarland University, Germany, where he received his diploma in computational linguistics and his PhD in machine translation. His thesis work focused on developing ways of automatically comparing verb valence between English and German using parallel corpora. During a one-year stay at ICSI at the University of California in Berkeley in 2011 and 2012, he worked with researchers in the FrameNet Project, who are building a lexical database based on frame semantic analyses. He is interested in how grammar and semantics interact in translation.
Email: czulo@uni-leipzig.de
Website: https://home.uni-leipzig.de/czulo/
Karen Ewing
Karen is a lecturer in German at UT Austin. Her graduate work focused on the Texas German spoken in Lee County, Texas. As a result of her having lived in the USA, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, Karen's accent can be hard to place, but guesses have been as varied as Australia, South Africa, Belgium, and Croatia. She splits her free time between family, volunteering, and vicariously solving murder mysteries in Oxfordshire and surrounding counties.
Email: karen.ewing@gmail.com
Maggie Gemmell, Ph.D.
Maggie received her Ph.D. at UT Austin in May 2015, the title of her dissertation is "Semantic role alignment in metaphor: A frame semantic approach to metaphoric meaning." In her dissertation, she is using frame semantics as a descriptive and analytical framework for the study of metaphor. Since September 2016, Maggie is on the faculty of Southern Oregon University, and she continues to collaborate with the GFN group. Some of her interests are lexical semantics, figurative language, politeness, linguistic register, and foreign language education.
Email: gemmellm@sou.edu
Anja Moehring, Ph.D.
Anja has been working as Research Associate for G-FOL since 2017, compiling semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic information for the lexical units in the database as well as developing new frames and teaching materials. Her linguistic interests lie in Valency Theory, Construction Grammar, Frame Semantics, and the application of these concepts to German language pedagogy. She holds a master's degree in German Language and Literature, sociology and theatre sciences and a postgraduate degree in teaching German as a foreign language from Leipzig University, Germany as well as a PhD in German linguistics from UT Austin. Anja has taught German in various settings in Germany and for college students at The University of Texas at Austin, Baylor University and McLennan Community College in Waco, TX.
Email: a.moehring@gmail.com
Miriam Petruck
Miriam R. L. Petruck received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. A key member of the team developing FrameNet since the project's founding, her research interests include semantics, knowledge base development, grammar and lexis, lexical semantics, Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. Miriam wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation in Frame Semantics and lectures internationally about Frame Semantics.
Email: miriamp@icsi.berkeley.edu
Alexander Ziem
Alexander is chair for German Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. His research includes frame semantics (e.g. null instantiations, metaphors, frames for language learners), construction grammar (sentence types, argument structures, constructicon-related issues, etc.) and discourse analysis (emergence, variation of word meanings in texts and discourse). Alexander has worked in various teaching and research positions at the Universities of Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bremen, and Basel (Switzerland). He received his doctorate from Düsseldorf in 2007; his thesis on frames of understanding (de Gruyter, 2008) has been translated into English (Benjamins, 2014). In 2013 and 2014, Alexander worked as researcher at FrameNet, ICSI, Berkeley. Since 2011 he has been the director of the graduate program "The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science" in Düsseldorf.
Email: ziem@phil.hhu.de
Visitors
Tang Ruilian, Visiting Scholar
Associate Professor, College of International Studies Southwest University. Ruilang holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Shanghai International Studies University. His research interests include pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, and foreign language education.
Email: tangruiliang@hotmail.com
Wang Qian, Visiting Scholar
Associate Professor, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures Sichuan University. Qian holds an M.A. in Foreign and Applied Linguistics from Sichuan University. Her research interests include cognitive linguistics and teaching English as a foreign language.
Email: qw75@utexas.edu
Former Members
John Benjamin, Graduate Student
John Benjamin is currently in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Germanic Studies at UT. His academic interests include literacy and theories of reading, comics/graphic novels in Germany, and Polish language/culture. He has a B.A. in German from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in German from Princeton University. In his free time, John enjoys going hiking with his wife, playing music, reading comics, and cheering for the New York Red Bulls.
Email: johndbenjamin@utexas.edu
Inge de Bleecker, Graduate Student
Inge is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at UT. Her current research focuses on spoken dialog systems, specifically on building natural language generation components using FrameNet. She has extensive industry experience in intelligent user interfaces and multilingual NLP applications.
Email: inge_debleecker@yahoo.com
Derek Brown, Graduate Student
Derek is a graduate student in the linguistics department and a student technician for the ~FASTTex program. His current research focuses on the lexical semantics of adjectives in large-scale corpora. his interests include lexical semantics, information extraction, knowledge representation, Zymurgy, and outdoor grilling.
Email: d_brown@mail.utexas.edu
Home page: webspace.utexas.edu/d_brown/www
Ryan Dux, Ph.D.
Ryan received his Ph.D. at UT Austin in May 2016, with a dissertation on verb classification in German and English (A usage-based approach to verb classes in English and German). During the 2016-2017 academic year he was a visiting assistant professor for German and Linguistics at Bucknell University. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Ryan holds a prestigious Mellon-Volkswagen postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany. His academic interests include the syntax-semantics interface, verb classification, multilingual lexicography, and contact linguistics. He has a B.A. in German from the University of Wisconsin. In his free time, Ryan enjoys being with friends, playing games and cheering for the Green Bay Packers.
Email: ryjodux@gmail.com
Home page: http://ryandux.weebly.com/research.html
Mario Guajardo, Graduate Student
Mario joined the Computer Sciences department at UT-Austin as a Masters student in Spring 2006. In addition to computational linguistics and related areas, his current research interests also include algorithms, bioinformatics, distributed systems and computer networks. In his spare time, he likes playing squash, tennis or racquetball, as well as taking close-up pictures of small things (such as flowers and insects;) he also enjoys learning how to play piano and guitar.
Email: guajardo@mail.utexas.edu
Guido Halder, Graduate Student
Guido received his Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics in 2011, with a frame-semantic dissertation on support verb constructions in German. His areas of interests are Semantics, Swiss German, Contrastive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. He has a Handelsdiplom from the Handelschule KV Baselland, Switzerland, a Masters of Art in Teaching from Trinity University and a Masters in German from UT. He has taught German, Economics and Government in Texas. On his time off, Guido enjoys playing tennis, SCUBA diving, cooking and traveling. Guido currently works as a lecturer at Washington and Jefferson College.
Email: guido.halder@gmail.com
Alexander Lorenz, Graduate Student
Alexander is a Ph.D. student in the Germanic Studies Department at UT Austin. He received his MA in Germanic Studies and TESOL from the University of Mississippi. His research interests in second language acquisition and foreign language pedagogy include grammar and vocabulary learning, instructional technologies, collaborative learning, and student-teacher beliefs about language learning. Alexander was awarded the foreign language teaching excellence award in 2016 and teaches lower-level German courses at UT, where he uses G-FOL to teach German vocabulary. He analyzes student perceptions on using online dictionaries for vocabulary acquisition and gets valuable feedback from his students to constantly improve G-FOL.
Email: alorenz@utexas.edu
Elias Ponvert, Graduate Student
Elias was a graduate student in the Linguistics Department, where he received his Ph.D. in 2010. His interests include formal semantics, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and human-computer interaction.
Email: efp@uts.cc.utexas.edu
Sumeet Rao, Graduate Student
Sumeet was a Masters student at the Department of Computer Sciences at UT Austin. Between January and July 2006 he was a GRA from FastTex for German Framenet for Summer 2006. His current research interests include Wireless networks, network security and database systems. His interests also include understanding different social and work cultures.
Email: sumeet@cs.utexas.edu
Annika VanNoy, Ph.D
During her time as a Ph.D. student in Germanic Studies at UT, Annika worked with GFN for several years. In May 2017 Annika graduated with her Ph.D., the title of her dissertation is "Culture Specific Aspects of Semantic Frames in Multilingual Frame Descriptions." Her academic interests include second language acquisition, frame semantics and foreign language pedagogy. She has a B.A. in translation and interpreting from the University of Mainz, FASK Germersheim and an M.A. from the University of Kentucky.
Email: annika.vannoy@gmail.com
Former Visitors
Anderson Bertoldi received his Ph.D. from the Applied Linguistics Graduate Program at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brazil). His research is applying frame-semantics in contrastive linguistic studies between Portuguese and English. His interests include lexical semantics, contrastive linguistics, knowledge representation and computational linguistics. With financial support from the Brazilian funding agency CAPES he spent the calendar year 2010 as a visiting scholar with German FrameNet at UT Austin. He currently works as Assistant Professor at Unisinos University in Brazil.
Email: andersonbertoldi@yahoo.com
Rove Chishman is an Associate Professor at the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil. Her areas of interest include computational semantics and corpus linguistics. She was a visiting scholar within the German FrameNet Project at UT Austin from March 2009 to June 2009, when she developed her post-doctoral research. Being advised by Hans Boas, she applied Talmy's theory and FrameNet paradigm to describe motion verbs in Portuguese. In Brazil, she coordinates the FrameCorp Project, whose objective is to construct a Brazilian Portuguese corpus with Frame Semantics annotation. She also coordinates the Kicktionary_Br, a Brazilian Portuguese version of the Kicktionary Project, a multilingual electronic dictionary of soccer language being developed by Thomas Schmidt.
Email: rove.chishman@gmail.com
Xia Guo, an associate professor for linguistics at Sichuan University in China, spent the academic year 2014-2015 at German FrameNet and the Linguistics Research Center at UT Austin. Her academic interests include the syntax-semantic interface, construction grammar and contrastive linguistics. She received her doctorate in 2012 and her thesis was about Chinese verbal phrases with prototypical meaning of direction. Since 2005 she has worked in teaching and researching at Sichuan University, and she participated in the training program of TESOL at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh in 2012.
Email: xiaguo2005@gmail.com
Jianing He is a professor of English language at School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS), with (Business English) Lexicography as his main area of research. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in Lexicography (orientation) in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (major) from GDUFS and was a post-doctoral researcher in Corpus-based Lexicography at the University of Warwick, a visiting scholar in Pedagogical Lexicography at the University of Exeter, and is a Fulbright visiting research scholar in Computational Lexicography at the Linguistics Research Center / German FrameNet at the University of Texas at Austin.
Email: jianing.he.cn@gmail.com
Home page: http://jianinghe.weebly.com
Han-Chun Huang is an Associate Professor at National Hsinchu University of Education, Taiwan. His areas of interests include lexical semantics, morphology, Construction Grammar, and syntax-semantics interface. He was a visiting Ph.D. student with German FrameNet at UT Austin under the supervision of Hans C. Boas from September 2006 to April 2007, and got his PhD degree in linguistics from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan in 2008. His dissertation topic is on the resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. He is working on the lexical semantics of Hakka (a Sinitic language with speakers mainly in Taiwan and China) with a corpus-based approach.
Email: hambao@gmail.com
Shuguang Li is an Associate Professor of linguistics in English Department at Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. His research interests include syntax, lexical semantics, critical discourse analysis, contrastive linguistics and history of linguistics. He received his PhD degree in English linguistics from Nanjing Normal University in 2007 and spent the academic year 2014-2015 with German FrameNet at the Linguistics Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
Email: lishuguang@njnu.edu.cn
Alba Luzondo received her Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at the University of La Rioja (Spain). Her research, framed within the field of Construction Grammar, focuses on lexical constructional interaction under the scope of the Lexical Constructional Model. Likewise, she is currently working as a knowledge engineer in the domain of "transformation" (or change) on a lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language processing (NLP) systems called FunGramKB. Her interests include construction grammar, semantics, computational linguistics and knowledge representation. She loves to bike, and run around with her dog, Tobías.
Email: alba.luzondo@gmail.com
Nuria Del Campo Martínez received her Ph.D. from the Linguistics Program at the University of La Rioja in Spain. Her research focuses on the constructional component of illocution and the cognitive processes involved in illocutionary interpretation. This study applies FrameNet towards the development of a speech act categorization that considers semantic and syntactic criteria. She spent the fall 2010 semester at UT Austin with the financial support of the University of La Rioja.
Email: ndcm85@gmail.com
Gan Qingfeng is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at Shanghai University (PR China). He is interested in contrastive Construction Grammar, the syntax-semantics interface, theoretical linguistics, and foreign language acquisition.
Email: qfutaustin@gmail.com
Last updated November 2022
