Piek Vossen

Piek Vossen develops computer models that can understand human language. He headed the EuroWordNet, a project that linked words in eight languages to one other based on their meaning, resulting in a giant ‘wordnet’. Computers can use wordnets to differentiate between the word ‘bank' as a monetary institution and ‘bank’ as the shore of a river. Vossen is also considered the most prominent Dutch researcher in the field of text-mining. He came up with the ‘History Recorder’, a computer program that documents history by 'reading' the news each day and aligning current events with events from the past to form a single storyline. Vossen worked in the private sector for about ten years before his meteoric rise in science.