Curriculum vitae

Personal information

• Gideon Kotzé, PhD, born June 9, 1981, Empangeni, South Africa

Office

• Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET)
  Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts
  Department for the Study of Religions
  Centre for the Digital Research of Religion
  Veveří 26
  602 00 Brno
  Czech Republic

Current position

• Research fellow in natural language processing

Academic qualifications

• 2013: PhD in Computational Linguistics; University of Groningen; thesis: "Complementary Approaches to Tree Alignment: Combining Statistical and Rule-Based Methods"
• 2007: Master of Arts in Linguistics (Lexicology and Terminology); Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; thesis: "Building a WordNet for Afrikaans: Preliminary research in the form of an inquiry into the feasibility and optimal methodology for the development of a wordnet database"
• 2005: Baccalaureus Artium Honores in Applied Language Studies (Translation Studies) (cum laude); Nelson Mandela University
• 2003: Baccalaureus Artium in Applied Language Studies (cum laude); Nelson Mandela University

Professional experience

• 2022 - : Research fellow at DISSINET project, Masaryk University
• 2020 - 2023: Research fellow at Department of South African Sign Language and Deaf Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa
• 2020 - 2022: Mobile application developer at Department of South African Sign Language and Deaf Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa
• 2021 - 2022: Web application developer at Department of Geography, University of South Africa
• 2020: Developer: automated quality assurance of African WordNet project, University of South Africa
• 2016 - 2019: Senior researcher in computational linguistics at the Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa
• 2014 - 2016: Postdoctoral fellow in computational linguistics at the Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa
• 2008 - 2012: Doctoral candidate at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• 2008: Developer: Extension of Afrikaans WordNet project, North-West University, South Africa
• 2006 - 2007: Data developer and researcher, North-West University, South Africa
• 2006: Intern, Vrije University Amsterdam

Teaching activities

• 2015: Supervision of two students at the level of Baccalaureus Artium Honores for the module "Honours Research Report", at the University of South Africa
• 2009: Undergraduate course "Tekstmanipulatie" (text manipulation) co-presented at University of Groningen (2009)

Research activities

• 2014-2019: Sustainable Multilingualism in the South African Context: statistical machine translation, parallel corpora, bitext alignment, digitization pipelines, corpus design and construction, TEI-XML
• 2008-2013: PaCo-MT (Parse and Corpus Based Machine Translation) and PhD thesis: sentence, word and syntactic tree alignment (bitext alignment), single and parallel treebanks
• 2006-2007: Afrikaans WordNet: semi-automated wordnet conversion, manual translation of synsets (lexicography), wordnet design

Other academic activities, research projects, grants

• 2021-2023: Research fellowship, Department of South African Sign Language and Deaf Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa
• 2016-2019: Senior researcher, Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa
• 2014-2016: Postdoctoral Fellow, Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa

Most significant professional accomplishments

• 2022-2026: Research fellowship at ERC funded DISSINET project, Centre for the Digital Research of Religion, Masaryk University, Czechia
• 2021-2023: Research fellowship, Department of South African Sign Language and Deaf Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa
• 2016-2019: Senior researcher, Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa
• 2014-2016: Postdoctoral Fellow, Academy of African Languages and Science, University of South Africa
• 2008-2013: PhD, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• 2006-2007: Main developer and project leader of Afrikaans WordNet project, North-West University, South Africa

Major publications

• KOTZÉ, Gideon, Vincent VANDEGHINSTE, Scott MARTENS and Jörg TIEDEMANN. Large aligned treebanks for syntax-based machine translation. LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION. NETHERLANDS: SPRINGER, 2017, Vol. 51(2), p. 249-282. ISSN 1574-020X. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9369-0. info
• KOTZÉ, Gideon. Complementary Approaches to Tree Alignment: Combining Statistical and Rule-Based Methods. Online. Groningen, The Netherlands: University of Groningen, 2013, 221 pp. ISBN 978-90-367-6177-2. info

2022/10/31