Katrien Beuls

Complex Systems Summer School 2012 Home Surveys/Evaluations Logistics Faculty Participants Schedule Lecture Readings Background Readings Software Projects & Working Groups Tutorials Blog Glue Session Forum Project Presentations Final Papers After Hours Photos TShirts

Me with my supervisor, Luc Steels, at an offsite meeting in the French Alps last year

Katrien Beuls is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Brussels (Belgium). She has a background in cognitive linguistics (University of Leuven, Belgium) and speech and language processing (University of Edinburgh, Scotland). Before joining the AI Lab in Brussels, Katrien worked as an intern at the Austrian Acoustic Research Institute (2008) and the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna (2009), where she conducted research for her MSc dissertation on Text categorization for Intellectual Property. Katrien is particularly interested in modeling the emergence of agreement systems. Apart from that, she is building a prototype for tutoring games, in which a human user learns a language system from a software agent, inspired by the methodology of evolutionary language games. She received a four year PhD grant from the Flemish Institute for Innovation and Technology (IWT).

For more information and a list of my publications, please visit my webpage.

Questions: One of the things I am interested in is the view of grammar as a complex adaptive system, in which processing plays a crucial role (interpretation effort, articulatory effort, acoustic interpretation, etc.). The synchronization between different levels of language (phonology, morphology, ... , pragmatics) is one of the research questions I am working on, with specific focus on language repair. I bring expertise on the development of grammar formalisms (in particular Fluid Construction Grammar), the implementation of experiments into the evolution of language(s) (in terms of language games), statistical machine learning and cognitive linguistics. Possible projects that I have in mind are on the evolution of linguistic concepts, learning grammar from large data sets or a network analysis of language use based on social network data.