Menno van Zaanen's homepage

You found Menno van Zaanen's homepage.

I am

• a member of the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), which again is part of the School of Humanities at Tilburg University;
• an assistant professor (see Teaching);
• a researcher (see Research);
• a member of the Board of Examiners of the School of Humanities;
• coordinator of the Human Aspects of Information Technology (HAIT) Master's program;
• I used to be chair of the ICGI, but I'm still a founding member of the ICGI steering committee.
  

Here you can find personal information about me. There is a generated page, maintained by the university, but I also have a page with contact details. Then there is also my cv (which is typically a bit outdated) and a page with some pictures of me.

This package contains the implementation of a simple chart parser. There is nothing fancy here, but the package is well documented and the code is quite efficient. (No special optimisation has been performed though.)

If you have any questions or would like to see some additional information, please let me know.

Please note that when you download it, you will need to register with me (so I can keep track of who uses it). Your email address will NOT be used for anything else. If you want to know about future releases of my software, you can indicate this, but the default is not to let you know.

Register the software with me at: <mvzaanen@uvt.nl>. It is free and your email address will not be misused!!! (I'm just curious who is using it and why.)

Download

• License Agreement
• Readme
• chart package version 0.1

This page contains information about conferences I have been to, or want to or plan to go to.

I hope/expect/plan to go to

• None at the moment.

I am currently involved in or have been involved in:

• Benelearn 2013 Program committee member;
• Machine Learning journal special issue on grammatical inference reviewer;
• AAAI-13 Student Abstract and Poster Program Reviewer;
• Information journal Reviewer;
• EPSRC Reviewer proposals;
• AAAI Student session Program committee member;
• Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal Reviewer;
• Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Reviewer;
• NWO Reviewer proposals;
• Natural Language Engineering journal reviewer;
• CLIN journal, guest editor;
• 6th "Starting Artificial Intelligence Research" Symposium (STAIRS), program committee member;
• ESSLLI student session 2012, reviewer;
• 11th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2012, program committee member and publicity chair;
• European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012), program committee member;
• LaTeCH, program committee member;
• Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN22), organizer;
• Pautomac Probabilistic Automata learning Competition, scientific committee member;
• Benelearn 2012, program committee member;
• EACL 2012 Workshop on Computational Models of Language Acquisition and Loss (Cognitive 2012), program committee member;
• EACL 2012 workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities, program committee member;
• Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing - FSMNLP 2012, program committee member;
• Computer Speech and Language, reviewer;
• ALTA 2011, program committee member;
• Benelearn 2011, program committee member;
• CLIN journal (following CLIN 2011), journal editorial board member;
• ESSLLI student session 2011, reviewer;
• FSMNLP 2011 : 9th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing", program committee member;
• ICML 2011, reviewer;
• 1st International Workshop on Learning, Agents and Formal Languages (LAFLang), 2011, program committee member
• Natural Language Engineering, reviewer;
• ALTA 2010, program committee member;
• ICGI 2012; program committee member;
• Cognitive Aspects of
  Computational Language Acquisition, 2010, reviewer;
• Fifth European Starting AI Researcher Symposium (STAIRS 2010), program committee member;
• TAL journal, reviewer;
• ICGI 2010, program committee member;
• Journal of Machine Learning Research, reviewer;
• European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010), program committee member;
• Natural Language Engineering special issue on "Finite-state methods and models in NLP", reviewer;
• Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing - FSMNLP 2009, program committee member;
• ALTW 2009, program committee member;
• EACL 2009, reviewer;
• EACL student workshop 2009, panelist;
• ECML/PKDD 2009, program committee member;
• Cognitive Aspects of Computational
  Language Learning (EACL workshop 2009), program committee member;
• ALTW 2008, program committee member;
• ICGI 2008, program committee member;
• QAWeb conference 2008, reviewer;
• ECML/PKDD 2008, program committee member;
• IJCNLP 2008, reviewer;
• LATA 2008, reviewer;
• Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, reviewer;
• ALTW 2007, program committee member;
• The First International Workshop on Question Answering (QA2007), program committee member;
• EMNLP-CoNLL 2007, area chair for Grammar Learning (empirical);
• ACL 2007 QA, IE and IR track, reviewer;
• ACL'07 workshop Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, program committee member;
• ICML-2007 Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Grammar Induction, program committee member;
• third Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM07), review committee member;
• European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information workshop (ESSLLI'07), workshop on 'Exemplar-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Use', programme committee member;
• International Workshop on Formal Models (WFM'07), program committee member;

Conferences I have been to (some may be missing...)

• 2012
  • 11th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2012
  • LREC 2012, Workshop @NLP can u tag #user_generated_content ?!;
• 2011
  • ACL 2011
• 2010
  • ICGI 2010
• Some info is missing here.
• 2007
  • PACLING 2007
  • Second National IT Confrence on Organizational Transformation through Information Technology: Issues and Challenges
• 2006
  • ALTW
  • HCSNet Summerfest
  • ICGI
  • COLING/ACL
• 2005
  • MT Summit X
  • Workshop on Grammatical Inference Applications (IJCAI) (I haven't actually been here, but I have co-organised it)
  • ALTW
  • HCSNet Data workshop
  • Algorithms for Linguistic Processing Workshop
• 2004
  • ALTW and ALTSS
  • ICGI
  • ATILA
  • ECDL (CLEF)
  • Proofing Tools and Language Technology
  • The plastic brain
  • LREC
• 2003
  • ATILA
  • ALTW
  • ECML/PKDD
  • ESCOM
  • ICT Kenniscongres
• 2002
  • Developing Spelling Checkers for South African Languages Symposium
  • DIR
  • ICMAI
  • CLIN
  • ICGI
• 2001
  • CLIN
  • BNAIC
  • ACL-EACL
• 2000
  • CLIN
  • ICGI/CoNLL/LLL
  • COLING
  • ICML
  • CLUK
• 1999
  • CLIN
  • CLUK
• 1998
  • CLIN

To find more information on that courses that I am teaching, check the menu at the left.

I am also involved in the Master thesis support (Master thesis and Master's cycle: CIW).

In the past, I have taught courses (or supervised practical work) on

• information retrieval (Information Search, Retrieval and Recommendation, Tilburg, The Netherlands),
• digital heritage (Digital Heritage, Tilburg, The Netherlands),
• software engineering (ITEC800, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia),
• computational linguistics (Language and Speech Technology: Advanced, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Language Technology, Potchefstroom, South-Africa; Computational linguistics, Leeds, U.K.),
• computer science (Master Course on Computer Science for Linguists, Potchefstroom, South-Africa; Programming and Programming Languages: Coding Cultures, Amsterdam, The Netherlands),
• machine learning (Machine Learning for Linguists, Potchefstroom, South-Africa),
• algorithms (String Algorithms, Groningen, The Netherlands), and
• databases (Database Theory, Leeds, U.K.).

This page contains some links that have to do with the sports (and other active hobbies) that I do.

Running

• RunningAHEAD
• Uitslagen.nl
• Inschrijven.nl
• Tilburg Road Runners
• Sydney Striders (I used to be a member)
• Asics (running)
• Personal results

Ultimate Frisbee

• Flying High (Tilburg)
• Gronical Dizziness (Groningen)

Diving

• PADI
• Scubaspots

Kiting

• Vliegerforum
• Vliegerwereld
• Peter's Kite Site
• Commercial kite plans

Kite Surfing

• Kitesurfing School
• Kitesurfing Nederland
• Sky High Kitesurfschool

Geocaching

• Geocaching (The Antipodes)
  
• Geocaching Australia (The Antipodes)
  
• Placename search (Australia)

I am a member of the Dutch Pinball Association and I am also a member of the DPA homepage team taking care of the Waar kan je nog lekker flipperen" ("Where to play pinball") pages.

At the moment I own a The Shadow, Theatre of Magic, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon and a Lord of the Rings. We also have a Time Machine, Power Play and a Strikes and Spares on loan.

I have owned:

• CFTBL (Creature from the Black Lagoon)
• JD (Judge Dredd)
• Tiger Rag, which is a conversion of a Dolly Parton, but has the same play as Kings of Steel
• ST:TNG (Star Trek The Next Generation)
• AfM (Attack from Mars)
• The Shadow
• Johnny Mnemonic
• Sorcerer
• Nitro Ground Shaker
• Tales From The Crypt
• Robot

And have borrowed one:

• WW (Whirlwind)

Online Pinball (Parts) Shops

• Pinball Wizard
• Flipper winkel
• Multigame
• Serious Pinball
• Best of Pinball
• Parts4pinballs
• Pinball Heaven
• Marco's
• Bay Area Amusements
• Mad amusements
• The Pin Witch
• Planetary pinball
• Flipperteile
• Pinled (displays and boards)
• Pinball Inc (ramps)
• Pinball decals
• High class pinballs (mods)
• Pinball center (mods)
• Pinball dreams (mods)
• Superflux (mods)

DEMOCRAT is a consensus machine translation (MT) system. It stands for Deciding between Multiple Outputs Created by Automatic Translation. It takes the output of several MT systems and combines the translations in one, hopefully, better translation.

How the system works internally and some results of the system have been published in
"DEMOCRAT: Deciding between Multiple Outputs Created by Automatic Translation",
Menno van Zaanen and Harold Somers,
Proceedings of the 10th Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, Thailand, pp. 173-180, 2005.

PDF
BibTeX entry

If you have any questions or would like to see some additional information, please let me know.

Please note that when you download it, you will need to register with me (so I can keep track of who uses it). Your email address will NOT be used for anything else. If you want to know about future releases of my software, you can indicate this, but the default is not to let you know.

Register the software with me at: <mvzaanen@uvt.nl>. It is free and your email address will not be misused!!! (I'm just curious who is using it and why.)

Download

• License Agreement
• Readme
• DEMOCRAT package version 1.0

A suffix tree is a data type that can be used for several things. Its main use is to efficiently search substrings in larger strings. This can be done in linear time.

However, the algorithm that builds a suffix tree is not straightforward. It took me some time to get it to work, so I would like to share it with you. It is written in C++. There used to be two versions available, one with template classes and one without. However, the current implementation only uses templates.

If you have any questions or would like to see some additional information, please let me know.

Please note that when you download it, you will need to register with me (so I can keep track of who uses it). Your email address will NOT be used for anything else. If you want to know about future releases of my software, you can indicate this, but the default is not to let you know.

Register the software with me at: <mvzaanen@uvt.nl>. It is free and your email address will not be misused!!! (I'm just curious who is using it and why.)

Download

• License Agreement
• Readme
• suffixtree package version 0.3
• suffixtree package version 0.2 (old)
• suffixtree package version 0.1 (old)

This page is almost up-to-date. Some PDF files may still be missing. I am in the process of adding these as well. If you are interested in a PDF that is not in this database, please let me know and I will add it. Publications can be found here.