Tania Avgustinova (PD Dr. habil. Senior Researcher & Senior Lecturer)

studied Slavistics at the Faculty of Slavic Studies at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, and received her M. A. with specialisation in computational linguistics in 1987. Immediately after university she joined the Linguistic Modelling LaboratoryBulgarian Academy of Sciences. From 1987 to 1989 she was involved in a large project on Bulgarian and Russian computational morphology as well as in computer-oriented lexicographic work on Bulgarian and Russian. From 1989 to 1991 she was mainly concerned with grammar writing and implementation for a syntactic parser of Bulgarian. In 1991-1992 she co-operated in a Bulgarian-German word order project sponsored by the German science foundation (DFG). During her time at the Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, she also taught courses at the University of Sofia.

In 1993 she joined the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, being involved both in research projects and teaching. She worked on special issues of computational grammars of Bulgarian and Czech in the framework of an EU-funded project on language processing technologies for Slavic languages (LATESLAV). Her research was also concerned with the applicability of the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) to Slavic languages. In 1997 she received her Ph.D. in Slavic and Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

In 1998 she was awarded an individual grant from the German science foundation (DFG) to work on modular language-family oriented grammar design at the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics in Saarbrücken. She also contributed to the research in various projects of the department (e.g., NEGRA, TIGER, PERFORM). In 2001, she participated in the project COLLATE for setting up a competence center of language technology at DFKI and Saarland University.  In 2002 she joined DFKI LT-Lab as Senior Researcher and Coordinator of EU research in language technology. In 2003 she received venia legendi in general linguistics.

Currently, PD Dr. habil. Tania Avgustinova is Senior Researcher at DFKI Language Technology Lab and Senior Lecturer in Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. She has extensive experience in multilingual and monolingual grammar engineering, computational modelling of Slavic languages and machine translation.