Uni-Tübingen

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21.12.2023

Honorary doctorate for linguist Harald Baayen

University of Tartu honors Tübingen researcher’s contributions to quantitative linguistics methodology and a long-standing collaboration

Harald Baayen and Toomas Asser shake hands in front of a large audience, Anti Selart is standing next to them
Harald Baayen with the Rector of the University of Tartu, Toomas Asser, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Anti Selart (left to right)

Harald Baayen, Professor of Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Tübingen’s Department of General and Computational Linguistics, was granted an honorary doctorate in linguistics from the University of Tartu in Estonia. Baayen was honored for his outstanding contribution to the development and teaching of quantitative linguistics methodology and his long-standing collaboration with the linguists of Tartu’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The honorary doctorate was conferred on 1 December as part of the University of Tartu’s celebrations for its 104th anniversary.

Baayen’s ties to the linguists at the University of Tartu go back to 2004 when he presented a paper there. Since then, his collaboration with Estonian researchers has resulted in several articles and book chapters, and Baayen has repeatedly taught classes, presented papers and served as a consultant to colleagues in Tartu. Currently, a Tübingen-Tartu team is working on a paper reporting on a large experiment addressing lexical processing in Estonian, which they are analysing using deep learning computational models. “What I find especially interesting about Estonian is its nominal morphology, which has no less than 14 cases in the singular, and 14 cases in the plural,” Baayen says. “We are currently developing deep learning models with the aim of showing that speakers can learn the complex morphological system of Estonian without having to discover complex abstract rules in combination with large numbers of inflectional classes.”

Harald Baayen joined the University of Tübingen with a Humboldt Professorship in 2011. He has received two ERC Advanced Grants from the European Research Council (ERC), most recently for his project “Subliminal learning in the Mandarin lexicon”.

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