Professor and Chair of the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University. Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. Professor of the Computer Science Department and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction of the DFG (German Science Foundation).
Coordinator of the European Network of Excellence META-NET, Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL), Honorary Professor at Technische Universität Berlin, Coordinator of the International Erasmus Mundus Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies, Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Past Member of the Board of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, Past Member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech, and serves on several international editorial and advisory boards. He is a co-founder of XtraMind Technologies GmbH, Saarbruecken (now part of attensity inc.), acrolinx gmbh, Berlin and Yocoy Technologies GmbH, Berlin. From 2005-2011, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the international initiative dropping knowledge.
His current research interests are computer models of natural language understanding and production, advanced applications of language and knowledge technologies such as semantic information systems, translingual technologies, cognitive foundations of language and knowledge, deep linguistic processing of natural language, syntax and semantics of natural language and the grammar of German.