Sture Allén

Timeline

1. 1928–1965

   A doctorate in text analysis

   Born in Gothenburg in 1928, he earns a doctorate in Nordic languages at the University of Gothenburg in 1965. His thesis describes a computer-supported method that he learns to program in machine code and applies to a text corpus of 17th-century letters.

2. 1972

   A chair in computational linguistics

   In 1972, he becomes Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Swedish Council for Humanities Research, with the chair based at the University of Gothenburg. The chair is considered the first of its kind in the world, and he establishes the Department of Computational Linguistics, known as Språkdata.

3. 1975

   Founding Språkbanken

   In September 1970, he argues for a Swedish language bank in a Dagens Nyheter op-ed. In 1973, the Computational Linguistics Unit submits a proposal to the Ministry of Education for earmarked funding. In 1975, the Logotheque, Språkbanken's initial name, is established with national funding as a research infrastructure for Swedish corpus lexicography.

4. 1980–1986

   Academy and university leadership

   In 1980, he is elected to chair 3 of the Swedish Academy and receives responsibility for its dictionary work. He serves as Pro-Rector of the University of Gothenburg from 1980 to 1986.

5. 1984

   An undergraduate program

   As scientific leader of the Computational Linguistics Unit, he initiates an undergraduate program in computational linguistics, which starts at the University of Gothenburg in 1984.

6. 1986–1999

   Permanent Secretary

   In 1986, he becomes Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy and holds the post until 1999. He leads the Academy through 13 years of extensive dictionary and classics projects and initiates Svenska Akademiens grammatik in four volumes.

7. 2009

   Svensk ordbok and digitization

   In 2009, the Swedish Academy publishes the two-volume Svensk ordbok, and Allén helps make its completion possible. He also initiates digitization of Svenska Akademiens ordbok, which becomes freely available online.

8. 2022

   Death at 93

   He dies in 2022 at age 93. His computer-supported dictionary work underpins the svenska.se portal, where readers can search three dictionaries at once, and provides a starting point for the SAOL app.