Leo Wanner earned his Diploma degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of The Saarland, Germany. Prior to joining ICREA he held positions at the German National Centre for Computer Science (GMD), University of Waterloo, the University of Stuttgart and the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. As visiting researcher, he was affiliated with U of Montreal, U of Sydney, U of Southern California's Institute for Information Sciences, U Paris 7, Columbia University, and U of Augsburg. Throughout his career, Leo has been involved as Principal Investigator in a series of national and European research projects. He has published eight books and about 200 peer reviewed papers. He is Associate Editor of the Computational Intelligence Journal and serves as regular reviewer for a number of high profile conferences and journals in the areas of (Computational) Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.

Research interests

Leo Wanner is working in the field of computational linguistics, teaching the computer to understand spoken and written natural language material,  to supply people with information that might be useful to them and to interact with people. His research areas include human-computer interaction (in particular, the design and realization of conversation agents that reveal social and cultural competence), automatic written and spoken graph transduction-based language generation, automatic summarization of written material, data-driven parsing, information extraction, and, more recently, profiling of authors of written material and the information structure-prosody interface. He is furthermore interested in lexicology and lexicography, and there, in particular, in the automatic recognition, representation and use of lexical idiosyncrasies (so-called “collocations”) by both native speakers and learners of a language. An important characteristics of his research is that it is multilingual.