Dafydd Gibbon

Infobox academic name = Dafydd Gibbon image = Dafydd-Gibbon.jpg birth_date = the lexicography of spoken languages, He is particularly concerned with endangered languages since 2016.

Early life and education Dafydd Gibbon was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK.

Gibbon studied German, French and theology at King's College, University of London. He earned his B.A. Honours from the University of London and his Associate of King's College in 1966. He received his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Göttingen in 1976,

Academic career Gibbon started his academic career in the year 1968 as an English lecturer at the Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Göttingen, Germany. Four years later he became an assistant professor at that university and held this position until 1980. In 1980–1981 he worked as professor for Theory and Practice of translation at University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.

Gibbon participated in the European Speech Assessment Methods (SAM) project and was involved in development of the SAMPA Alphabet in this project, and in the European EAGLES projects. As part of these projects he was lead editor of two handbooks on standards and evaluation of speech technology systems (1997, 2000).

In the international Verbmobil project for speech-to-speech translation, he was the lexicographic coordinator for the development of an inheritance lexicon, supporting speaker independent automatic translation from German to English and Japanese.

He became Convenor of the international COCOSDA group (International Coordinating Committee for Speech Databases and Assessment) from 2006 until 2014.

He has published mainly in the areas of computational phonology, prosody, and lexicography. He has researched English, German, Welsh, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Yacouba, and Baule (Ivory Coast), Tem (Togo), Igbo, and Ibibio (Nigeria), Kuki-Thadou (India) and Mandarin (China), and is particularly concerned about endangered languages.

On 10 March 2010, Gibbon was selected as Linguist of the Day on the Linguist List and then again on 27 March 2018 as Featured Linguist.

His Erdős number is 4, with the lineage Erdős – Tarski – Maddux – Ladkin – Gibbon,

Awards Gibbon has received various awards including the following: 1968: University of London Laurel for ecumenical work on the Religious Affairs Sub-Committee as President of the John Clifford Society (London Baptist Students Society) 2006: Silver Jubilee Distinguished Award of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria 2009: 2014: "Officier de l'Ordre du Mérite Ivoirien" in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, for his life's work in supporting linguistics and language technologies in West Africa

Selected publications Books

Book chapters and articles Gibbon, Dafydd (1988). "Intonation and discourse." In Janos Petöfi, ed. (1988), Text and Discourse Constitution. Berlin: de Gruyter. 3-25. Gibbon, Dafydd (1995). "Empirical and semiotic foundations of prosodic analysis." In: Uta Quasthoff, ed. (1995), Aspects of Oral Communication, Research in Texttheory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Gibbon, Dafydd (1992). "ILEX: A Linguistic Approach to Computational Lexica." Computatio Linguae, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 73:32-53. Gibbon, Dafydd and Inge Mertins (2000). "Terminology for spoken language systems." In: Gibbon, Dafydd, Inge Mertins and Roger Moore, eds. (2000). Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems: Resources, Terminology and Product Evaluation. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 240-280. Gibbon, Dafydd (2001). "Finite state prosodic analysis of African corpus resources," Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, Denmark, I: 83-86. Gibbon, Dafydd (2006). "Time Types and Time Trees: Prosodic Mining and Alignment of Temporally Annotated Data." In: Sudhoff, Stefan, Denisa Lenertova, Roland Meyer, Sandra Pappert, Petra Augurzky, Ina Mleinek, Nicole Richter and Johannes Schließer, eds. (2006). Methods in Empirical Prosody Research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 181-210. Gibbon, Dafydd and Sascha Griffiths (2017). "Multilinear Grammar: Ranks and Interpretations." In: Open Linguistics 3 (1): 265–307.