Hermann Moisl

Timeline

1. 1949–1979

   From McGill to Oxford

   Born in Traunstein in 1949, he grows up partly in Montreal from the late 1950s and studies English and linguistics at McGill University from 1967 to 1971. After an MPhil in medieval studies at the National University of Ireland in Dublin, he studies for a DPhil at Oxford's Merton College from 1973 to 1979.

2. 1978–1987

   Newcastle and a computing MSc

   He lectures in Leicester University's Department of English in 1978–1979 and joins Newcastle University's Department of English Language in 1980. As the IT revolution takes hold in the mid-1980s, he turns to computational methods and studies for an MSc in computing science at Newcastle from 1985 to 1987.

3. 1992–2000

   Neural networks and an NLP handbook

   In 1992, he publishes “Connectionist finite state natural language processing” in Connection Science, and in 1997 he writes on recurrent neural networks for natural language processing. With Robert Dale and Harold Somers, he co-edits the 943-page Handbook of Natural Language Processing, published by Marcel Dekker in 2000, and writes its introduction to NLP based on artificial neural networks.

4. 2001–2012

   The Tyneside English corpora

   With Karen Corrigan, he works on the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE), where he is co-investigator in charge of all computational and IT aspects, from bespoke programs for correcting and merging the electronic materials to the TEI-conformant XML corpus. He is principal investigator on NECTE grants from the Catherine Cookson Foundation in 2001 and the British Academy in 2004, and co-investigator on the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) from 2010 to 2012.

5. 2013–2015

   A professorship and a clustering book

   He becomes a professor in Newcastle's School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics in 2013 and retires in September 2014 as Professor of Computational Linguistics. His 381-page book Cluster Analysis for Corpus Linguistics appears from De Gruyter Mouton in 2015 in the Quantitative Linguistics series. It argues that cluster analysis can serve as an empirical method for generating linguistic hypotheses by discovering latent structure in data from natural language corpora.

6. 2016–2023

   Vice-president of IQLA

   He serves as secretary-general of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association from 2016 to 2018. From 2018 to 2023, he is its vice-president, under presidents George Mikros and Adam Pawłowski.

7. 2022–2023

   A neural model of meaning

   In 2022, Minds and Machines publishes his paper on a dynamical systems implementation of intrinsic sentence meaning. His February 2023 paper in OBM Neurobiology gives a mathematical account of how a three-layer autoassociative multilayer perceptron generates representations homomorphic with the environment.

8. As of October 2026

   Attractor models of word meaning

   Retired, he works on the hypothesis that the brain implements word and sentence meaning as attractor trajectories in a high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical system. He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, which he joins in 2022, and publishes there on topology-preserving topographic representation for linguistic intentionality in 2025.