Dafydd Gibbon

Dafydd Gibbon
Born (1944-04-05) 5 April 1944 (age 80)[1]
Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Academic background
Alma mater
Academic work
DisciplineLinguist
Sub-disciplineComputational linguistics, phonetics
Institutions
Websitewwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/gibbon/

Dafydd Gibbon (born 5 April 1944) is a British emeritus professor of English and General Linguistics at Bielefeld University in Germany,[2] specialising in computational linguistics,[3] the lexicography of spoken languages,[4] applied phonetics and phonology.[5] He is particularly concerned with endangered languages[6][7] and has received awards from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Poland.[2]

Gibbon is the author of over 180 publications, editor of three handbooks and three further collections, and supervisor of 21 PhD theses.[8][1] He has been Visiting Professor at Jinan University (JNU), Guangzhou, China,[2][9][10] since 2016.[11]

Early life and education

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Dafydd Gibbon was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK.[1] He is the son of a Welsh Baptist clergyman, John Thomas Gibbon (1915–1973) and Mary Gibbon (née Hudson, a physical education teacher, 1918–2012), with whom he and his four siblings lived in different towns in England and Wales during their father's pastoral ministry. He attended elementary school and grammar school in Huddersfield and grammar schools in Llanelli, South Wales, and in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.[12] His grandparents were tenant farmers in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, and they and his father were native speakers of Welsh. As a child he experienced inter-generational language loss, being spoken to only in English, but retaining basic knowledge of Welsh thanks to Welsh lessons in school.[13]

Gibbon studied German, French and theology at King's College, University of London.[12] He earned his B.A. Honours from the University of London and his Associate of King's College in 1966. He received his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Göttingen in 1976,[14] with a dissertation on Perspectives of intonation analysis (1976).[15] Its discussion of "calling" or "vocative invocation" was considered "the most complete discussion of the subject to date".[16]

Academic career

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Gibbon started his academic career in the year 1968 as an English lecturer at the Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Göttingen, Germany. Four years later he became an assistant professor at that university and held this position until 1980. In 1980–1981 he worked as professor for Theory and Practice of translation at University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.[17][4] In 1981 he became professor of English and General Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Bielefeld University in Germany, working there until his retirement in 2009.[1][18]

Gibbon participated in the European Speech Assessment Methods (SAM) project and was involved in development of the SAMPA Alphabet in this project, and in the European EAGLES projects. As part of these projects he was lead editor of two handbooks on standards and evaluation of speech technology systems (1997, 2000).[4][19][20]

In the international Verbmobil project for speech-to-speech translation, he was the lexicographic coordinator for the development of an inheritance lexicon, supporting speaker independent automatic translation from German to English and Japanese.[4][21]

He became Convenor of the international COCOSDA group (International Coordinating Committee for Speech Databases and Assessment) from 2006 until 2014.[22][23][24]

He has published mainly in the areas of computational phonology, prosody, and lexicography.[25] He has researched English, German, Welsh, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Yacouba, and Baule (Ivory Coast), Tem (Togo), Igbo, and Ibibio (Nigeria), Kuki-Thadou (India) and Mandarin (China),[1][26][27] and is particularly concerned about endangered languages.[6][28][7]

On 10 March 2010, Gibbon was selected as Linguist of the Day on the Linguist List and then again on 27 March 2018 as Featured Linguist.[13][29]

His Erdős number is 4, with the lineage Erdős – Tarski – Maddux – Ladkin – Gibbon,[11] and his current h-index is 27.[30]

Awards

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Gibbon has received various awards including the following:[14]

  • 1968: University of London Laurel for ecumenical work on the Religious Affairs Sub-Committee as President of the John Clifford Society (London Baptist Students Society)[14]
  • 1992: Best Paper Award, KONVENS 1992, Nürnberg: "Prosody, time types and linguistic design factors in spoken language system architectures." (1992)[14]
  • 1994: Best Paper Award, DAGM Symposium, Wien: "Detektion unbekannter Wörter mit Hilfe phonotaktischer Modelle", co-awarded with A. Jusek, H. Rautenstrauch, G.A.Fink, F. Kummert, G. Sagerer, J.Carson-Berndsen (1994)[14]
  • 2001: Honorary membership in the Polish Phonetic Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Fonetyczne)[31]
  • 2006: Silver Jubilee Distinguished Award of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria[14]
  • 2009: Distinguished Service Medal of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland[32]
  • 2009: Urua, Eno-Abasi; Ekpenyong, Moses; Ahoua, Firmin (2009). Language Development beyond Borders. A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Dr. Dafydd Gibbon. University of Uyo, Nigeria and Université Houphouet Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. ISBN 978-978-055-556-6.
  • 2014: "Officier de l'Ordre du Mérite Ivoirien" in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, for his life's work in supporting linguistics and language technologies in West Africa[22][33][34]

Selected publications

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Books

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Book chapters and articles

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  • Gibbon, Dafydd (1988). "Intonation and discourse." In Janos Petöfi, ed. (1988), Text and Discourse Constitution. Berlin: de Gruyter. 3-25.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd (1995). "Empirical and semiotic foundations of prosodic analysis." In: Uta Quasthoff, ed. (1995), Aspects of Oral Communication, Research in Texttheory. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd (1992). "ILEX: A Linguistic Approach to Computational Lexica." Computatio Linguae, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 73:32-53.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd and Inge Mertins (2000). "Terminology for spoken language systems." In: Gibbon, Dafydd, Inge Mertins and Roger Moore, eds. (2000). Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems: Resources, Terminology and Product Evaluation. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 240-280.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd (2001). "Finite state prosodic analysis of African corpus resources," Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, Denmark, I: 83-86.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd (2006). "Time Types and Time Trees: Prosodic Mining and Alignment of Temporally Annotated Data." In: Sudhoff, Stefan, Denisa Lenertova, Roland Meyer, Sandra Pappert, Petra Augurzky, Ina Mleinek, Nicole Richter and Johannes Schließer, eds. (2006). Methods in Empirical Prosody Research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 181-210.
  • Gibbon, Dafydd and Sascha Griffiths (2017). "Multilinear Grammar: Ranks and Interpretations." In: Open Linguistics 3 (1): 265–307.

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Dafydd Gibbon (1 July 2016). "Curriculum Vitae". Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  2. ^ a b c "9th Speech Prosody: Keynotes". Speech Prosody 2018. 25 April 2018. Archived from the original on 26 April 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2018.
  3. ^ Lyding, Verena (2009). "Preface" (PDF). LULCL II 2008 : proceedings of the Second Colloquium on Lesser Used Languages and Computer Linguistics (LULCL II) : Bozen-Bolzano, 13th-14th November 2008. Bozen: European Academy Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC). p. 10. ISBN 978-88-88906-52-2. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  4. ^ a b c d Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, Katarzyna; Przedlacka, Joanna (2008). English pronunciation models : a changing scene (2nd ed.). Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 467–468. ISBN 978-3039116829. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  5. ^ Rauh, Gina (1983). "Aspects of Deixis". Essays on Deixis. 188–190. Tubingen: Narr: 37. ISBN 9783878089599. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  6. ^ a b Vetulani, Zygmunt (2011). Human language technology : challenges for computer science and linguistics : 4th Language and Technology Conference : LTC 2009, Poznan, Poland, November 6-8, 2009 : revised selected papers (1st ed.). Heidelberg: Springer. p. vi. ISBN 9783642200946. Retrieved 22 July 2018.
  7. ^ a b Gibbon, Dafydd. "Computing with or for minority languages? Aims, methods and responsibilities in computational linguistics" (PDF). 13-14.11.2008 - Conference Lesser Used Languages and Computer Linguistics: "Combining efforts to foster computational support of minority languages" (LULCL II) Programme and abstracts. p. 10. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  8. ^ Urua, Eno-Abasi; Ekpenyong, Moses; Ahoua, Firmin (2009). Language Development beyond Borders. A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Dr. Dafydd Gibbon. University of Uyo, Nigeria and Université Houphouet Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. ISBN 978-978-055-556-6.
  9. ^ Gibbon, Dafydd; Liu, Huangmei (2018). "Variability in Mandarin Tone Perception: a multidialectal approach". Speech Prosody 9, 2018, Poznań, Poland: 488–492. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-99. S2CID 53033456. Retrieved 23 July 2018. The work was partly supported by a visiting professorship grant to the first author by JNU
  10. ^ Tan, Lester; Berney, Louis (14 November 2017). "Jinan's School of Foreign Studies Celebrates 90th Anniversary". Retrieved 22 May 2018.
  11. ^ a b Dafydd Gibbon (11 September 2015). "Home page of Dafydd Gibbon". Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  12. ^ a b "Prof. Dr. Dafydd Gibbon". Universität Bielefeld. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  13. ^ a b Dafydd Gibbon (10 March 2010). "How to become a linguist: some complicated ways". Linguist of the Day. The Linguist List. Archived from the original on 13 March 2010. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  14. ^ a b c d e f Dafydd Gibbon (4 March 2014). "Research Overview". Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  15. ^ a b "REVIEWS: Dafydd Gibbon, Perspectives of intonation analysis". IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. 18 (1–4): 159–177. 1980. doi:10.1515/iral.1980.18.1-4.159.
  16. ^ Ladd, Jr., D. Robert (September 1978). "Stylized Intonation". 54 (3): 517. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  17. ^ James, Allan; Westney, Paul (1981). New linguistic impulses in foreign language teaching. Tübingen: G.Narr. p. 303. ISBN 9783878081265. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  18. ^ "Personen und Einrichtungsverzeichnis - Universität Bielefeld". Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  19. ^ Sampson, Geoffrey (1999). "Book Reviews: Dafydd Gibbon, Roger Moore, and Richard Winski (eds). Handbook of Standards and Resources for Spoken Language Systems . Mouton de Gruyter. 1997. ISBN 3-11-015366-1". Natural Language Engineering. 5 (3). Cambridge University Press: 302–305. doi:10.1017/S1351324900222262. S2CID 33798806.
  20. ^ Gibbon, Dafydd (March 1997). "The EAGLES Spoken Language W orking Gr oup and the Handbook of S t andards and Resources for Spoken Language Systems" (PDF). The ELRA Newsletter. pp. 8–9. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  21. ^ Trippel, Thorsten (2006). The lexicon graph model : a generic model for multimodal lexicon development. Saarbrücken: AQ-Verl. ISBN 978-3922441908. S2CID 5121662.
  22. ^ a b "SPEAKERS / PRESENTERS". Digital Humanities in South Africa. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  23. ^ COCOSDA. "International Committee for Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases". Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  24. ^ TSENG, Chiu-yu; ITAHASHI, Shuichi (2007). "Oriental-COCOSDA— Language Resource Efforts of the Greater Asian Region" (PDF). Sinica. p. 126. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  25. ^ "Invited Speakers". The 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  26. ^ "Dafydd Gibbon". ORCID. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  27. ^ Ekpenyong, Moses Effiong (2018). Human Language Technologies for Under-Resourced African Languages : Design, Challenges, and Prospects Front cover image for Human Language Technologies for Under-Resourced African Languages : Design, Challenges, and Prospects. Cham Springer International Publishing. p. 4. ISBN 978-3319699608.
  28. ^ Dwyer, Arienne (2010). "Models of successful collaboration". In Grenoble, Lenore A.; Furbee, N. Louanna (eds.). Language documentation : practice and values. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins Pub. Co. p. 202. ISBN 9789027211750. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  29. ^ Dafydd Gibbon (27 March 2018). "Featured Linguist: Dafydd Gibbon". Official Linguist List Blog. Archived from the original on 10 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  30. ^ "Google Scholar: Dafydd Gibbon". Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  31. ^ Agnieszka Wagner. "Polish Phonetic Association - home page". Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  32. ^ "Medale za zasługi dla UAM". Archived from the original on 26 May 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  33. ^ "Dafydd Gibbon". "Culture & Technology" – The European Summer University in Digital Humanities. Retrieved 22 July 2018.[permanent dead link]
  34. ^ "calls for papers to the international conference /humbolt [sic] kolleg on Prosody and Language Technology: Challenges and Prospects, Abidjan May 4th to May 9th 2014". Retrieved 22 July 2018. As a major event, this conference plans also to honor two internationally renowned researchers who have significantly contributed to research in prosody in sub-Saharan Africa: Prof. Dafydd Gibbon from Germany (Bielefeld University, former host of several prominent Humboltians, award winner of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria) and from the US, Prof. Will Leben (Stanford University), for their linguistic contribution to the languages of this area.
  35. ^ Cichocki, Wladyslaw (June 1986). "Intonation, Accent and Rhythm: Studies in Discourse Phonology by Dafydd Gibbon, Helmut Richter". Language. 62 (2): 461–462. doi:10.2307/414696. JSTOR 414696.
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