Kris Heylen studied Germanic Languages and Literature at the KU Leuven, followed by a master’s in Artificial Intelligence with a specialization in speech and language technology. He obtained his doctorate in Linguistics in 2005 at the KU Leuven, with a quantitative corpus study into word order variation in German. As a research fellow at the research group Quantitative Lexicology and variation Linguistics (QLVL, 2006 to 2021), he further specialized as a corpus methodology expert by applying statistical and computational linguistic methods within cognitive-linguistic research. His focus 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.
Since joining the Dutch Language Institute (INT) in 2017, he has focused on optimizing the institute’s lexicographic databases, workflows and expertise in support of fundamental and applied research. As a senior researcher, he takes up a coordinating role for the INT’s R&D projects in (computational) lexicography, terminology and applied linguistics for modern Dutch. Within lexicology and lexicography, he has a particular interest in diachronic analysis and the detection and description of neologisms. He currently also serves in a leadership position in the European Network on Lexical Innovation (ENEOLI).
Kris is also still affiliated to KU Leuven as a guest lecturer in computational lexicology and terminology and as an affiliated research fellow at the QLVL research group, where he co-supervises lexical-semantic research within the Horizon 2020 MSCA project Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments (CASCADE).
Publications
- Tallarico, Giovanni, Rute Costa, Ana Salgado, Judit Freixa, Kris Heylen et al. 2025. ‘Lexicography and Neology: Building Bridges through a Multilingual Approach with ENEOLI’. Lexikos 35: 294–317.
- Geeraerts, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Kris Heylen, Mariana Montes, Stefano De Pascale, Karlien Franco, Michael Lang (2024). Lexical Variation and Change. A Distributional Semantic Approach.
- Heylen, Kris. (2023). Een levensloop van woorden. Een taalinfrastructurele behoefteanalyse voor de diachrone lexicologie van het Nederlands. In: K. Heylen, P. van Sterkenburg, R. de Bonth (Eds.), In termen van taal, pp 168-177.
- Montes, Mariana, Karlien Franco, Kris Heylen (2021). Indestructible insights. A case study in distributional prototype semantics. In: G. Kristiansen et al. (Eds.), Cognitve Sociolinguistics Revisited, pp 251-263.
- 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.