Bio

I was educated in mathematics, computer science and languages. My PhD degree is in General Linguistics (summa cum laude) and I obtained from the University of Vienna, where I have carried out research for over 20 years. The book based on my PhD research can be accessed here. It was published as No. 1 in the series Studies in Morphology, the companion bookseries to the journal Morphology published by Springer. The foreword is by my PhD advisor, Wolfgang U. Dressler.

Since 2019, I have researched natural language processing without grammar, initially with n-grams and now with tokens, as used in Large Language Models. In 2021, I claimed and showed that syntactic trees used for the formal representation of language in linguistic research, the so-called Chomskyan approach, are not hierarchical structures and have an unnatural direction of growth: from leaves to the root; the paper has over 8,000 downloads on LingBuzz (April 2026). Since then, Noam Chomsky, Matilde Marcolli and Robert Berwick have been looking for new representations of syntactic structures and have thus confirmed the correctness of my claims; their LingBuzz papers can be accessed here, and their book here (open access). As one could imagine, my research (by a scholar born in Eastern Europe) is mentioned in neither.

So far, my projects have been supported by: Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austrian National Bank (OeNB), Erste Bank (Die Erste) – Vienna, the Mayor of Vienna, the University of Vienna, European Science Foundation (ESF), SNS Pisa (Italy), Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, Junta de Andalucía (Spain), and private sponsors.

Besides linguistics, I love math and coding. My favourite mathematician is Carl Friedrich Gauss, and I have referred to his ideas for solving problems in morphology and syntax; see these papers: 1, 2, 3. I am also interested in algorithms, data structures, programming languages and complexity measurement, specifically in how to adapt the Big O notation to measure the complexity of linguistic analyses carried out within different frameworks, i.e., I believe that complexity in both computer science and linguistics is not a property of data but of analysis, and Gauss’s work is, in fact, the best illustration of this claim; see this presentation.

In 2023, I started the preparation of Gauss:AI.