Paul Siewert

  • CPGS in Computer Science
Paul Siewert

Contact

Location

  • GS10 (Computer lab)

About

[pʰaʊ̯l ˈziː.vɛɐ̯tʰ]

I am a PhD student at Jesus College. My training is mathematical, but the main work I do with my supervisor Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín is in mathematical linguistics. Please see my page on the Computer lab website for my non-linguistic interests.

"What counts is not what you cover, but what you uncover!"

2024 CPSG Computer Science at University of Cambridge
2023-2024 MASt. (Pure Mathematics) "Part III" at University of Cambridge
2021-2023 B.A. (Mathematics, Linguistics) at Georg-August Universität Göttingen

Research

I am firmly in theoretical linguistics to which I have a formal and philological stance – I want to see how any given human language's system of conveying meaning can be (systematically, explainably, formally, efficiently, ...) described and which problems arise in this. I think that constraint grammars are a very useful idea for this yet one with underdeveloped theoretical foundations, which I am currently working on, with a focus on phonology where this is called Optimality Theory (OT).

I am developing a version of OT which does not have the problem of computational intractibility. This I hope will make it easier to mathematically study the benefits and limitations of OT, to extend constraint grammars to other linguistic domains, and ultimately to describe languages.

Teaching and supervision

Supervisions: LT25 Logic and Set Theory (B. Löwe)