Lauri Carlson

Timeline

1. 1971–1979

   Studies in Helsinki

   Born in Urjala in 1952, he graduates from the Helsinki Normal Lyceum in 1971. He earns a Candidate of Philosophy degree at the University of Helsinki in 1976 and a licentiate in 1977, and works as a research assistant for the Academy of Finland from 1973 to 1979.

2. 1982–1985

   A dialogue games PhD at MIT

   He completes a PhD at MIT in 1982 with the dissertation Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse Analysis, advised by Paul Kiparsky. The Dordrecht publisher Reidel issues the book in its Synthese Language Library, and Deborah Schiffrin of Georgetown University reviews it in Language in Society in March 1985.

3. 1983–2001

   From docent to professor

   He lectures in general linguistics at the University of Oulu from 1983 to 1984 and is docent of general linguistics at the University of Helsinki from 1983 to 1993, serving as acting professor in 1989–1990. In 1993, he becomes Helsinki's professor of language theory and translation, and in 2001 its professor of language technology. Diana Santos completes a doctorate under his supervision at the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 1996.

4. 1985–1990

   Unification grammar papers

   His paper “LP rules in unification grammar” appears in the NODALIDA 1985 proceedings, and he presents “RUG: Regular Unification Grammar” at COLING 1988 in Budapest. With Maria Vilkuna, he coauthors “Independent Transfer Using Graph Unification”, a graph-unification approach to machine translation, at COLING 1990.

5. 1988–1992

   MENTOR/F machine translation

   From 1988 to 1992, he and Krister Lindén work with Seppo Koskenniemi of IBM Finland on MENTOR/F, a machine translation system from English to Finnish.

6. 2010–2012

   The Finnish WordNet

   In 2010, he and Krister Lindén publish a LexicoNordica article on FinnWordNet, built by professional translators who render the Princeton WordNet 3.0 synsets into Finnish, with funding from FIN-CLARIN at the University of Helsinki. He takes part in the FinnWordNet project as one of its advisors from 2010 to 2012. Diana Santos, Krister Lindén and Wanjiku Ng'ang'a edit the Springer Festschrift Shall We Play the Festschrift Game? for his 60th birthday in 2012; the volume credits him with an instrumental role in creating the initial Finnish WordNet.

7. 2010–2016

   MOLTO and TraST projects

   At the University of Helsinki, he works on two translation-technology projects: MOLTO – Multilingual On-Line Translation from 2010 to 2014, and Translation Studies and Terminology (TraST) from 2013 to 2016.

8. As of October 2026

   Emeritus professor in Helsinki

   With collaborators, he develops TermFactory, a platform for collaborative, ontology-based terminology work, in projects funded by Tekes and others. In October 2015, he and Igor Kudashev present “Towards Federation of Terminological and Ontological Resources” at the Crossing Borders terminology conference at the University of Helsinki. He is an emeritus professor of language technology at the University of Helsinki.