Petra Dünges

Department of Computational Linguistics

University of the Saarland

[Home] [Publications] [Associations] [Links] [Contact] [Department of Computational Linguistics]

Petra Dünges

I am a theoretical physicist and a PhD student at the Department of Computational Linguistics in the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken.

My research interests are now in the area of formal semantics and logic. I am currently working on my Ph-D thesis at the chair of Prof. Manfred Pinkal. The subject of my thesis is On the Foundations of Temporal Discourse Representation Theory. Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is an important theory of formal semantics for natural language and I am concerned with some of the basic building blocks of that theory. My point of departure is the book From Discourse to Logic by Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle. I propose several extensions and modifications of temporal DRT. Some results are not specific to DRT, but are applicable to other temporal theories with an eventuality based semantics as well.

My supervisor is Manfred Pinkal together with Patrick Blackburn and Werner Saurer.

I have been working on syntax, too. The book Anaphern, Quantoren und Parallelität by Jan Lerner and Petra Dünges was published by Gunter Narr Verlag.

Once I was a data base administrator for ADABAS (VMS) and did some system management in a VAX cluster of 50 machines at HBM (Hottinger Baldwin Messtechnik).

I got my physics diploma from the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz where I worked in the group for Theoretical High Energy Physics (=Theoretische Elementarteilchen-Physik, ThEP).

Apart from this I am interested in the structure of the Arabic language and I translate Arabic children's literature into German.

[Home] [Publications] [Associations] [Links] [Contact] [Department of Computational Linguistics]