Human language is used to transmit a huge amount of information, such as in news articles, books, scientific reports and social media posts. In his research, Christof Monz focuses on automated access to information, in particular language technology and machine translation. The goal of his research is to develop computer systems that can (1) understand natural language, (2) use automatically generated natural language representations to perform tasks, and (3) generate representations for multiple languages, ideally in a language-independent manner.

As an UvA professor, together with the researchers in his group, Monz will be attempting to bridge the gap between the challenge of modelling the complexity of human language, on the one hand, and the development of practical information technology in the field of language, on the other.

In addition to conducting and directing research, Monz will teach Bachelor’s and Master’s students about artificial intelligence, with a special focus on natural language processing and language technology.

About Christof Monz

Monz has worked at the UvA’s Informatics Institute since 2009, and has been an associate professor since 2013. He is head of the Language Technology Lab. Since 2021, Monz has been programme director of the Bachelor's programme in AI, and until 2020, he chaired the Examinations Board of the Bachelor's programme in Information Science and the Master's programme in Information Studies. He was previously a lecturer in Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, and prior to that was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland.

Over the course of his career, Monz has received several grants and research awards. In 2020, for example, he received a Vici grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his research into multilingual translation systems. In 2015, Monz received a Google Faculty Research Award, and in 2012, NWO awarded him a Vidi grant for his research on statistical machine translation. In late 2009, Monz was awarded an EU research grant to head a major project on multilingual text analysis.

Since, 2005, Monz has contributed to the annual organisation of the WMT International Machine Translation Conference, of which he is a co-founder.