Esben Alfort

Background

About Esben Alfort

As head of Language and Research in Ankiro Language Technologies I am a driving force behind our exploration and development of new and innovative ideas as well as coordinator of external research programmes in cooperation with universities and enterprises across Europe. My daily work at Ankiro involves a multitude of technologies such as NLP, ontology construction, information extraction, opinion mining, search log analysis, conceptual model construction and various kinds of automatic text analysis, as well as developing internal tools for those processes. The main focus is on the Scandinavian languages Danish, Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Finnish, as well as English and German, but I also work with many other languages, depending on customers’ needs. As a representative of Danish language technology in a small and undervalued sector of immense potential, I find it important to do what I can to improve the state of linguistic research and language technology in Denmark in general, and with that in mind I cooperate closely with Danish universities and the Danish Language Board. I am a member of University of Copenhagen’s advisory panel of employers, and I was invited to sit on the 2018 Committee for Language Technology appointed by the Danish Ministry of Culture. I furthermore work as a censor in linguistics and cognitive studies (including IT and Cognition) at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University. Educated as a linguistic typologist specialising in linguistic reference, my scientific mission has been to find out how language really works. I therefore have a wide knowledge of languages from all parts of the world, especially the Pacific, India and Africa as well as the various European families. My PhD research, which was co-financed by Ankiro and Copenhagen Business School, centred on the nature of relevance and context with a view to understanding the way people express themselves when using a search engine.