Kris Heylen studied Germanic Languages and Literature at the KU Leuven, followed by a master’s in Artificial Intelligence, during which he specialized in speech and language technology. He obtained his doctorate in Linguistics in 2005 at the KU Leuven, through quantitative corpus research into word order variation in German. As a research fellow at the Kwantitatieve Lexicologie en Variationele Linguïstiek research group (QLVL, KU Leuven, 2006 to 2021), he further specialized as a methodologist in applying statistical and computational linguistic methods within cognitive-linguistic research. His focus in this regard was on sociolinguistic and lexical-semantic variation in Dutch. He also used this expertise in multidisciplinary applied research in the fields of terminological support for translators, vocabulary acquisition in L2 learners, modelling clinical-terminological variation in patient records and – as visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s AI lab – in the development of innovative sentiment analysis techniques.
He has been working as a part-time linguistic researcher for the Dutch Language Institute (INT) since 2017, focusing on increasing the usability of the INT’s lexicographic databases and expertise for fundamental and applied research. As part of this effort, he coordinated the MentalLex project, which linked several linguistic and psycholinguistic lexical databases for the purpose of cognitive-linguistic research, and he collaborated on the design of the Lorentz workshop and the resulting whitepaper “The Future of Academic Lexicography”.
Publications
- Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Kris Heylen (2020). Schaalvergroting in het syntactische alternantieonderzoek. In: Nederlandse Taalkunde, 25 (1), pp 101-123.
- Wielfaert, Thomas, Kris Heylen, Dirk Speelman, Dirk Geeraerts (2019). Visual Analytics for Parameter Tuning of Semantic Vector Space Models. In: Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Verena Lyding (eds.), LingVis: visual analytics for linguistics (CSLI Lecture Notes no. 220), pp 215–245. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications, Center for the Study of Language and Information.
- Zenner, Eline, Kris Heylen, Kris, Freek Van de Velde (2018). Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change. Journal of Pragmatics, 133, pp 134-149.
- Heylen, Kris, Thomas Wielfaert, Dirk Geeraerts, Dirk Speelman (2015). Monitoring Polysemy: Word Space Models as a Tool for Large-Scale Lexical Semantic Analysis. Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics, 157, pp 153-172.
- Jocelyne Daems, Kris Heylen, Dirk Geeraerts (2015). Wat dragen we vandaag: een hemd met blazer of een shirt met jasje? Taal en Tongval, 67 (2), pp 307-342.
- Natalia Levshina, Kris Heylen (2014). A radically data-driven Construction Grammar: Experiments with Dutch causative constructions. In: Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman, Gijsbert Rutten (Eds.), Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar, pp 17-46. (Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR], 54). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN: 978-3-11-036627-3.
- Heylen, Kris, Frieda Steurs (2014). Translating legal and administrative language: How to deal with legal terms and their flexible meaning potential. In: Turjuman, 23 (2), pp 96-146.
- Heylen, Kris, Dirk De Hertog (2014). Automatic Term Extraction. In: Hendrik Kockaert, Frieda Steurs (Eds.), Handbook of Terminology. Volume 1, pp 199-219. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN: 9789027257772.
- Heylen, Kris, José Tummers, Dirk Geeraerts (2008). Methodological issues in corpus-based cognitive linguistics. In: Gitte Kristiansen, René Dirven (Eds.), Cognitive sociolinguistics: language variation, cultural models, social systems, pp 91-128. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN: 978-3-11-019625-2.