Mike Dillinger, PhD's Page

In case you’re curious…

My professional interests center on how people (and machines) use their knowledge of a topic and of a language to process texts for meaning.

I have (too many) degrees in Linguistics -- a BA from SUNY Buffalo (where I focused on bilingualism and Iberian languages), Masters’ degrees from both the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil and McGill University in Canada (where I focused on linguistics, cognition, and epistemology) – as well as a PhD earned at McGill’s Laboratory of Applied Cognitive Science. My dissertation was on the cognitive processes that constitute simultaneous translation of technical information. After all that, I was Professor of Linguistics and ran a Laboratory of Language and Cognition at a leading university in Brazil, and I worked on the editorial boards of several technical journals. For almost 30 years, I’ve been researching and teaching a wide range of topics related to language, in about a dozen countries, and in four languages.

I use this background in other activities besides teaching. I work as a management consultant, travelling around the world to help industrial and government clients improve (through training and automation) their processes of writing and translating technical documentation – they call this content management. I also do research and development work as an engineer: I build software that analyzes words, sentences, and large collections of texts to imitate human text processing abilities. I’m an expert in machine translation and I work at a startup company that’s building an automatic speech-to-speech translation system. I was also elected President of an international professional association: the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA).

My website is here.