Introduction
I am a senior scientist at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural
Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Human History and pursue an interdisciplinary research project on Computer-Assisted Language
Comparison (CALC), funded by the European Research
Council from April 2017 until March 2022. In this project, we will try to develop methods
and interfaces that bridge the gap between computational and classical approaches to historical
linguistics in order to shed light on the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
In my research, I generally follow a
data-driven, empirical, and quantitative perspective on language change and language history.
In contrast to pure computational approaches, however, I try to keep my research closely
connected to traditional historical linguistics and theory, following a computer-assisted rather
than a computer-based framework of quantitative research in historical linguistics.
