Short-CV

Miriam Butt has been Professor for General and Computational Linguistics at the University of Konstanz since 2003. As of 2022, she has joined the Centre for Human | Data | Society as a Principal Investigator. After receiving a bachelor’s double degree in Language Studies and Computer Science at Wellesley College (USA) in 1987, she received a master’s degree (1991) and her doctorate (1993) in linguistics at Stanford University (USA) (thesis: The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu). Miriam Butt has been the Spokesperson of the interdisciplinary research group “Questions at the Interfaces” involving linguists and computer scientists (2016-2023). She is also one of 25 founding Principal Investigators of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. She works within Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics and brings in expertise on the role of language data in societies where language data and NLP resources are sparse. She focuses especially on South Asian languages and is interested in issues of grammar architecture and the building of computational resources. Over the past decade, she has also worked closely together with colleagues in Computer Science in experimenting with visualizing linguistic patterns (LingVis) via methods developed in the field of Visual Analytics.

Research-related publications

• David Hägele, Christoph Schulz, Cedric Beschle, Hannah Booth, Miriam Butt, Andrea Barth, Oliver Deussen and Daniel Weiskopf. 2022. Uncertainty visualization: Fundamentals and recent developments. it - Information Technology, 2022, pp. 121-132. https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2022-0033
• Siskou, Wassiliki, Clara Giralt Mirón, Sarah Molina-Raith and Miriam Butt. 2022. Automatized Detection and Annotation for Calls to Action in Latin-American Social Media Postings. Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pp. 65-69. International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. https://aclanthology.org/2022.latechclfl-1.8.
• Rita Sevastjanova, Menatallah El-Assady, Adam James Bradley, Christopher Collins, Miriam Butt and Daniel Keim. 2021. VisInReport: Complementing Visual Discourse Analytics through Personalized Insight Reports. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 12, pp. 4757-4769. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3104026. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34379592.
• Sarveswaran, Kengatharaiyer, Gihan Dias and Miriam Butt. 2021. ThamizhiMorph: A morphological parser for the Tamil language. Machine Translation 35, pp. 37-70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-021-09261-5
• Kalouli, Aikaterini-Lida, Rebecca Kehlbeck, Rita Sevastjanova, Oliver Deussen, Daniel Keim and Miriam Butt. 2021. Is that really a question? Going beyond factoid questions in NLP. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), pp. 132-143. https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwcs-1.13/ (Outstanding Paper Award).
• Beck, Christin and Miriam Butt. 2020. Visual analytics for historical linguistics: opportunities and challenges. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. Special issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, Episciences.org, pages 1-23.
• Beck, Christin, Hannah Booth, Mennatallah El-Assady and Miriam Butt. 2020. Representation Problems in Linguistic Annotations: Ambiguity, Variation, Uncertainty, Error and Bias. In: Dipper, Stephanie, Amir Zeldes, Luke Gessler and Adam Roussel (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pp. 60-73. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2020.law-1.6/
• Ehsan, Toqeer and Miriam Butt. 2020. Dependency Parsing for Urdu: Resources, Conversions and Learning. Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pp. 5204-5209. European Language Resources Association. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.640
• Gold, Valentin, Mennatallah El-Assady, Tina Bögel, Christian Rohrdantz, Miriam Butt, Katharina Holzinger and Daniel Keim. 2017. Visual Linguistic Analysis of Political Discussions: Measuring Deliberative Quality. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32 (1), pp. 141-158. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv033
• Hautli, Annette, Sebastian Sulger and Miriam Butt. 2013. Adding an Annotation Layer to the Hindi/Urdu Treebank. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 7 (3). https://journals.colorado.edu/index.php/lilt/article/view/1263/1097