Walther von Hahn

Walther von Hahn (born April 26.1942 in Marburg/Lahn) is a German linguist and computer scientist and was until 2007 full professor both in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg.
Education and career.
Von Hahn studied German linguistics and literature, philosophy, Latin and Protestant theology in Marburg/Lahn from 1962 to 1969. He received his PhD (Dr.phil.) at the same university (with Prof. Dr. Ludwig Erich Schmitt). He moved as assistant to Hamburg University (Germany) and gave seminars in German linguistics. As a professor since 1978 his research and teaching shifted to more formal fields of formal in the German seminar thereat. In 1987 he was appointed to full professor in the computer science department. Since then he kept the right of teaching in both departments. He was founder of the “Natural Language Systems Division” (NatS).
Research.
Major research projects.
Following the lines of technical language research von Hahn established (within German linguistics) the “HAM-RPM” project group (funding: German Science Foundation) and the Artificial Intelligence-centered group HAM-ANS (funding: Ministry of research and technology), which have been very influential in the German linguistic and AI community. As member of CS department he initiated and managed a national preparatory project for speech-to-speech machine translation with broad industrial and academic cooperation and participated in the international follow-up research project VERBMOBIL
From 1992-1998 von Hahn led the project DB(R)-MAT the first major machine aided translation project involving languages in Central-Eastern Europe (Romanian and Bulgarian). The project based on an innovative paradigm of linking multilingual lexical material onto a language independent ontology. In this way concepts were separated from their linguistic realisation. This principle was applied in a European follow-up project , in which he was involved (2005-2008)
From 2001 to 2003 he was the first director of the interdisciplinary group "Computerphioogie" at the University of Hamburg, one of the first innitiatives in Digital Humanities in Germany and innitiated the first curriculum in this domain in Germany.
He is one of the main contributors to the development of computational linguistics and Digital Humanities at the University of Bucharest and constant promoter of the cooperation between the University of Hamburg and St-Kliment Ohrdiski University of Sofia, University of Bucharest and Charles-University Prague
Since 2015 his research is focused on computer modelling and representation of vagueness in digital humanities.