Hermann Moisl
Dr. Hermann Moisl is a retired Senior Lecturer and Visiting Fellow in Linguistics at Newcastle University. He was educated at various institutes, including Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford. Research interests include, amongst others, computational linguistics, Natural language processing, corpus linguistics, the cultural role of literacy and Celtic languages and history. He was a key investigator of the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English Project alongside former colleague, Professor Karen Corrigan, Professor of Linguistics and English Language. Other expertise. Old / Middle English and Old Irish / Middle Irish language and literature. Projects. A Linguistic Time-Capsule: The  Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE), AHRB project code RE11776 Project Leaders: K. Corrigan, J. Beal, H. Moisl Postgraduate Supervision Natural language modelling and text processing. My specific areas of interest are natural language understanding systems and multivariate analysis of text corpora. Qualifications. BA (McGill University) MPhil (Trinity College Dublin) DPhil (University of Oxford) MSc (Newcastle University) Postgraduate supervision. Natural language modelling and text processing. His specific areas of interest are natural language understanding systems and multivariate analysis of text corpora. Dr Moisl has been developing a strictly sequential natural language understanding architecture that dispenses with two foundational principles  of generative linguistics, mainstream cognitive science, and much of artificial intelligence—that natural language strings have complex syntactic structure processed by structure-sensitive algorithms, and that this structure is crucial in determining string semantics. This sequential architecture was originally stated in terms of standard automata theory as a system of cooperating finite state automata, but more recently I have become interested in neuroscientific work which identifies chaotic attractor trajectory in state space as the fundamental principle of brain function at a level above that of the individual neuron, and which indicates that sensory processing, and perhaps higher cognition more generally , are implemented by cooperating attractor sequence processes. Some relevant publications are: Together with Karen Corrigan of Newcastle University and Joan Beal of Sheffield University, He has recently completed the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE), a corpus of dialect speech from Tyneside in North-East England. It is based on two pre-existing corpora, one of them collected in the late 1960s by the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) project, and the other in 1994 by the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) project. NECTE amalgamates the TLS and PVC materials into a single Text Encoding Initiative  (TEI)-conformant XML-encoded corpus and makes them available in a variety of aligned formats: digitized audio, standard orthographic transcription, phonetic transcription, and part-of-speech tagged. This website describes the NECTE corpus in detail, and makes it available to academic researchers, educationalists, the media in non-commercial applications, and organisations such as language societies and individuals with a serious interest in historical dialect materials. Since completion of the NECTE project he has been developing a methodology for sociolinguistic and dialectological study of the corpus, the aim of which is to attempt to identify interesting regularities in phonetic variation among informants  in the corpus, and any correlations between such variation and associated social factors. The methodology is based on the one formulated by the originators of much of the NECTE corpus, the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS). It was radical at the time and remains so today: in contrast to the then-universal and still-dominant theory driven approach, where social and linguistic factors are selected by the analyst on the basis of some combination of an independently specified theoretical framework, existing case studies, and personal experience of the domain of enquiry, the TLS proposed a fundamentally empirical approach in which salient  factors are extracted from the data itself and then serve as the basis for model construction. To implement its approach the TLS used a particular exploratory multivariate analytical technique, hierarchical cluster analysis, but its work never progressed beyond preliminary studies for a variety of theoretical and practical reasons. His development of the TLS methodology