PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Harald Hammarström

Harald Hammarström is a linguistics researcher who studies word structure and language history with computational methods. He studied computer science at the University of Amsterdam, completed a PhD in computational linguistics at Chalmers in 2009, and held postdoctoral positions in Nijmegen and Leipzig. He coauthored Glottolog/Langdoc, coordinated research on computational language history, and coauthored digital resources for studying the world's grammars and language identifiers. As of October 2026, he is Professor in General Linguistics at Uppsala University and an editor of Glottolog 5.3.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    Morphology from written text

    In 2007, he writes a licentiate thesis on unsupervised learning of morphology from text. It describes a simple model of concatenative affixation, which explains how stems and affixes build words.

  2. 2009

    A computational linguistics PhD

    He studies computer science at the University of Amsterdam and earns a PhD in computational linguistics at Chalmers in 2009. His postdoctoral positions are at Radboud University Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

  3. 2012

    Glottolog/Langdoc bibliography

    With Sebastian Nordhoff, he coauthors a 2012 paper presenting Glottolog/Langdoc, a bibliography that gives web access to 180,000 records for low-visibility resources from low-density languages.

  4. 2015

    Algorithms for language history

    At NIAS, he coordinates the Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics theme group from September 2015 to November 2015. Its research question is how a computer can calculate language history from linguistic data.

  5. 2020

    The DReaM Corpus

    In 2020, he coauthors The DReaM Corpus, a multilingual digital collection of thousands of grammars that users can search through established corpus infrastructures. Its metadata and text annotations support searching and analysis.

  6. 2022

    Glottocodes for language data

    In 2022, he and Robert Forkel describe Glottocodes, identifiers that link language families, languages, and dialects to reference information.

  7. As of October 2026

    Professor at Uppsala

    As of October 2026, he is Professor in General Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University. In April 2026, he travels the world to study and document rare and unique languages. He co-edits Glottolog 5.3 with Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath, and Sebastian Bank.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Sources and credits

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  1. Unsupervised Learning of Morphology: Survey, Model, Algorithm and Experiments research.chalmers.se. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Harald Hammarström documents languages on the verge of extinction — Uppsala University uu.se. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Glottolog 5.3 — About glottolog.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Harald Hammarström — ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Hammarström, Harald — NIAS nias.knaw.nl. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. The DReaM Corpus: A Multilingual Annotated Corpus of Grammars for the World's Languages — ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Harald Hammarström — Uppsala University uu.se. Checked 19 October 2026.