PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

I Wayan Arka

Also known as ᬇᬯᬬᬦ᭄ᬅᬃᬓ, Wayan Arka

I Wayan Arka is an Indonesian linguist from Bali who builds computational grammars of Indonesian at the Australian National University. After a BA at Udayana University in 1985, he earned a PhD at the University of Sydney in 1999 with a thesis on Balinese morphosyntax and pragmatics. His Indonesian work includes a two-level morphological analyser coauthored in 2008, the IndoGram deep grammar presented in 2012 within the ParGram project, and the ten-language ParGramBank treebank in 2013. Elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2021 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2022, he also works on the Enggano language and leads an ARC project on the languages of Sumatra's Barrier Islands. He is a Professor of Linguistics at ANU and, since 2024, again heads its Linguistics Program.

Timeline

  1. 1962–1999

    From Bali to a Sydney PhD

    Born in Bali in 1962, he earns a BA in English linguistics at Udayana University in 1985 and an MA in TESOL and applied linguistics at Hasanuddin University in 1990. He moves to Sydney in 1995 for an MPhil in linguistics and completes a PhD at the University of Sydney in 1999, with the thesis From Morphosyntax to Pragmatics in Balinese under William A. Foley and Jane Simpson.

  2. 2001–2008

    Fellowships at ANU

    He joins ANU linguistics as a postdoctoral fellow in 2001 and becomes a research fellow in 2004 and a fellow in 2008. Pacific Linguistics publishes his book Balinese Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach in 2003, and he spends 2006 as a research fellow at IIAS at Leiden University.

  3. 2008–2009

    An Indonesian morphological analyser

    In 2008, he coauthors A Two-Level Morphological Analyser for the Indonesian Language with Femphy Pisceldo, Rahmad Mahendra and Ruli Manurung at the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop. In 2009, he, Meladel Mistica, Avery Andrews and Timothy Baldwin update their implemented Indonesian grammar to handle verb reduplication with the agentive voice affix meN.

  4. 2012–2013

    IndoGram and ParGramBank

    At PACLIC in Bali in 2012, he presents IndoGram, a deep grammar of Indonesian built in the LFG-based Parallel Grammar (ParGram) framework with the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) parser. In 2013, he coauthors the ACL paper on ParGramBank with Sebastian Sulger, Miriam Butt and others; the parallel treebank covers ten languages from six language families and is built from deep LFG grammars.

  5. 2012–2021

    Cologne and a professorship

    He is a Humboldt Fellow at Cologne University from 2012 to 2014 and heads ANU's Linguistics Program from 2014 to February 2021. He becomes a senior fellow and associate professor in 2015 and a professor in 2021. Oxford University Press publishes Modular Design of Grammar: Linguistics on the Edge in 2021, which he edits with Ash Asudeh and Tracy Holloway King.

  6. 2021–2022

    Two academy fellowships

    He is elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2021. In 2022, the Australian Academy of the Humanities elects him a Fellow for his work on language literacy education and on the maintenance and documentation of minority languages in Indonesia.

  7. Since 2023

    Barrier Islands and Enggano

    He works on two Enggano language projects funded by UK AHRC grants, from 2019 to 2023 and from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, he begins leading the ARC-funded project Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology with Simon Greenhill and Dani Or; set to run until 2027, it aims to produce language grammars, language corpora and lexical databases.

  8. Since 2024

    Head of linguistics at ANU

    Since 2024, he again heads the Linguistics Program in ANU's School of Culture, History & Language, where he is a Professor of Linguistics. He also remains a lecturer at Udayana University, where he has taught since 1986.

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  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. I Wayan Arka - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Wayan Arka | School of Culture, History & Language chl.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. A Two-Level Morphological Analyser for the Indonesian Language - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Double double, morphology and trouble: Looking into reduplication in Indonesian - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Developing a deep grammar of Indonesian within the pargram framework: Theoretical and implementational challenges - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. ParGramBank: The ParGram parallel treebank - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. The new Social Science Fellows campusmorningmail.com.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Announcing 2022 Academy Fellows – Australian Academy of the Humanities humanities.org.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. I Wayan Arka - The Australian National University researchportalplus.anu.edu.au. Checked 19 October 2026.