Manfred Pinkal

Manfred Pinkal is a computational linguist whose work explores meaning, ambiguity and context in natural language. He studied linguistics, German, philosophy and computer science in Bochum and Stuttgart, earned a doctorate in Stuttgart in 1976, and held professorships in Hamburg and Saarland. His work includes Radical Underspecification and the SALSA corpus, which adds semantic-role annotations to German newspaper text. The DFG awarded him the 2000 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, and he became deputy director of Saarland’s MMCI Cluster in 2007. As of October 2026, he is a co-opted emeritus in computational linguistics at Saarland University.

Now at: Saarland University
Born: 1949
Badges: Loyal

Years link to their sources.

Timeline

1976

Studies in linguistics and computing

He studies linguistics, German, philosophy and computer science in Bochum and Stuttgart, and earns a doctorate in Stuttgart in 1976.
1984–1990

A Hamburg professorship

After completing a habilitation in Düsseldorf in 1984, he holds a C3 professorship in computer science at Hamburg from 1987 to 1990.
1990

Computational linguistics at Saarland

He takes a C4 professorship in computational linguistics at Saarland University in 1990 and works with a graduate college and Collaborative Research Center 378.
1995

Radical Underspecification

In 1995, he publishes Radical Underspecification in the Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium. His research examines natural-language meaning, with attention to vagueness, ambiguity and context.
2000

A Leibniz Prize

The DFG awards him the 2000 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. His work helps establish computational linguistics in Germany and connects linguistics with computer science.
2006

The SALSA corpus

In 2006, he coauthors the SALSA paper, which describes a large German corpus with manual role-semantic annotations based on the syntactically annotated TIGER newspaper corpus.
2007

Deputy director of MMCI

In 2007, he becomes deputy director of the Cluster of Excellence “Multi-Modal Computing and Interaction” (MMCI).
As of October 2026

Co-opted emeritus

As of October 2026, he is a co-opted emeritus in computational linguistics at Saarland University.

Career

Since 1990Saarland UniversityC4 professor of computational linguistics
From 2007Multi-Modal Computing and Interaction Cluster of ExcellenceDeputy director
1987–1990Universität HamburgC3 professor in computer science