• Hendrik Maryns
• Logik und Sprachtheorie
• Wilhelm Schickard-Institut für Informatik
• Universität Tübingen

Welcome to the personal pages of

Hendrik Maryns

Hendrik Maryns

Universität Tübingen
Wilhelm Schickard-Institut für Informatik
Logik und Sprachtheorie

Sand 13

D-72076 Tübingen

Germany

Office: Raum 1.10

Coordinates: 48°32′04.21″N 09°04′19.63″E

Phone: +49-7071-29-70548

Email: maryns@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (PGP key)

http://www.tcl-sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/hendrik

1982-04-24

Professional

Paul Hertz

Currently, I am working on the work of Paul Hertz, a physician, logician and philosopher of the early 20th century, and the relevance of his logical work to current-day mathematical logic.

MonaSearch

In my time at the SFB441 at the university of Tübingen, I wrote a query tool for linguistic tree banks. The goal was to write a query tool which can handle queries of some formalism stronger than first order logic.

Since I am no longer employed at the university, development on MonaSearch has stalled. If anyone is interested in continuing development, feel free to contact me for getting started.

The approach is to use results of the 70s to convert an MSO formula into a tree automaton, and to use those tree automata to query the trees.

• The Javadoc.
• The project is now hosted in Launchpad, where you can get the source, file bugs and help translate.

Publications

• An article about the problems using the naive approach to implementing the transition function of the automata, using simple hash maps, has appeared in the proceedings of TLT’06 in Prague: On the Implementation of Tree Automata: Limitations of the Naive Approach (TeX source, BibTeX).
  Remark 18 June 2007: Since then, I discovered a serious flaw in the code, such that the results in the article are not representative any more. Minimizing automata at the right times proved to be essential. Right now, memory is no longer the main problem.
• A second approach was to implement the transition functions as MDDs. This proved mildly successful. An article about the algorithms used is in progress: Non-Deterministic Multi-valued Decision Diagrams with Default Value and their Application in Tree Automata (TeX source, BibTeX).
• We finally discovered a way to interact with an existing automaton package, Mona. This approach worked leading to the release of MonaSearch. My colleague and I wrote an article about it: MonaSearch – A Tool for Querying Linguistic Treebanks (TeX source, BibTeX), in the proceedings of TLT’09 in Groningen.

My general bibliography file is used in compiling most of the above.

I am ever and always grateful for any, be it tiny, correction to any of the above files.

Slides

• The presentation accompanying the first TLT article (never held, unfortunately ☹) (TeX source).
• An introduction to Dynamic Syntax, held at the Seminar for linguistics at Tübingen University (in German) (TeX source).
• A talk about the implementation issues of MonaSearch (in German) (TeX source). The same talk in English (TeX source).
• A general talk about MonaSearch (TeX source).

The university logo and other common images are used in the slide shows.

Java APIs

In the process of writing the above tool, some modules came into existence which I believe might be interesting. These might be outdated, please contact me for newer versions if you would like to use them.

• A formula API

  The formula module of the query tool program. Designed to handle MSO formulas, but also useful for first order logic formulas.
  Javadoc

• Combinatorics utility classes

  Some classes that perform combinatoric operations, such as computing all permutations of a list, or the Cartesian product of a multidimensional list.
  Javadoc

Curriculum Vitae

My CV in Dutch, English or German.

Technical

• A rant on getting Eclipse to work on 64 bit openSuse. The problem has now been fixed.
• Want to type Unicode symbols like … and – directly form your keyboard also? I found an easy way to make your keyboard output what you want!

Private

Activities

• I drilled down my activity in the Dutch translation of Firefox, Thunderbird and related projects but am still emotionally involved. Unfortunately, there is no Belgian version. I am eager to start one, but have until this day not found enough people to help me with it, and it is too much work to do alone. If you are interested, let me know!
  I am proud to present my latest achievement: Firefox will from now on use proper ellipsis symbols (U+2026: …) in all of its translatable strings.
• Less actively, I cooperate in the OpenTaal project. We are working on an open-source spelling dictionary for the new Dutch spelling. The word list is recognized by the Dutch/Belgian spelling authority.
• I also help out in a lot of other translation projects for open-source software, such as Eclipse and the GNU translation project.
• I’ve been bit by the Wiktionary bug, where I can be found as Hamaryns (administrator now!), and am spending way too much time editing pages there.
• I help out in the local Fair Trade Shop.
• Check out the ultimate team in Tübingen.
• A lot of other hobbies and time-consuming activities exist, but they, by their nature of being time-consuming, did not deserve a place on this web site, yet. Maybe later…
• I’m afraid I’m on Facebook and Academia.edu and some other of those “social” sites.

Ideology

Here are some projects and ideas I heartily support:

• Direct democracy! The way to go in Europe (and the rest of the world). Aktion Volksabstimmung works on this in Germany.
• Solving the problems in the world would be so easy, really:
  1. Spend all the money that is spent in military now on education, especially on projects on actively living in peace. How to spread this money, you ask? How about free education for all? Free meals in school? Free school trips? Free writing material? …
  2. Create a “health tax” which would primarily make sugar and sweeteners more expensive, probably white flour also and spend this money on health infrastructure. Probably tobacco, alcohol and other drugs (see below) should be taxed heavily as well. This should even appeal to more right-wing oriented people: make people pay for it if they make themselves unhealthy. Similarly: free health care, also support alternative medicine, …
  3. Create an “environment tax” (or make the existing ones more consistent) which makes petrol products (especially kerosine) so expensive that it is more interesting to take the bycicle and spend this money on investigations in regenerative energy, environmental work and cycle lanes.
  4. Most importantly, introduce a basic income. It has been sufficiently proven that this is possible.
  5. Oh, and don’t forget the Tobin tax.
  6. Did I mention the EPAs should be abolished?
  7. Finally, to make life easier on our dear politicians, we would of course install direct democracy (see above) to have the system self-regulate.

  Those are my less controversial ideas. I’d also like to see religion abolished, but people probably can’t handle that.

Aufsatz über Fichte.

Created:
Last updated:

These pages are under permanent construction. I am trying to do everything right.
In case of problems or for comments, please contact me.
© Copyright Hendrik Maryns

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