Arjan Van Hessen

Biography

After my studies Geophysics and Italian and a PhD in Phonetics, I worked for three years at two universities in Germany (Düsseldorf and Ulm) and then three years in Brussels at the renowned TST company Lernout & Hauspie. In this way, step-by-step came into the world of Language and Speech Technology (TST). A fascinating environment where technology is combined with "man" in the broad sense of the word. During my Brussels period, it became evident that I did not want to work in a "mere" commercial environment and that the combination of research and business life seemed to be quite ideal. Once back in the Netherlands (1998) this could be achieved because two outstanding applications (University of Twente and ComSys) were both positively evaluated within a few days. Since then, I've shared my working life between academia and business. In 2009, there was something else: CLARIN.NL, the infrastructure program for the Humanities. CLARIN's goal is to standardize both textual sources and tools that can do something about it. One example is speech recognition: only a few researchers can just install a speech reader with an appropriate language model on the computers at work. Also, most non-technical texts can convert existing text corpora into a format suitable for the recognizer. Clarin aims to provide an infrastructure that allows researchers to use the available data and tools without too much technical know-how. the Humanities Infrastructure Program. CLARIN's goal is to standardize both textual sources and tools that can do something about it. One example is speech recognition: only a few researchers can just install a speech reader with an appropriate language model on the computers at work.

Research Interest

Information Technologies in Science and Society