Ruud de Jong studied Human Media Interaction at the University of Twente.
After his studies, he worked in a European consortium of scientists and healthcare experts, in affiliation with the University of Twente and l’Université de Genève. The consortium developed a 3D simulation of a person with Alzheimer’s disease for the purpose of training caregivers. Within this project, Ruud was responsible for the automatic generated language in the conversations between the virtual patient and the caregiver. Developing this trilingual system increased Ruud’s interest in language and computational linguistics. Two of the system’s components, SimpleNLG-NL and ExpReal, are available as open-source software.
Ruud has been working as a software developer at the Dutch Language Institute (INT) since 2021.
Publications
- Szilas, Nicolas, Ruud de Jong, Mariët Theune (2020) ExpReal: a Writing Language and System for Authoring Texts in Interactive Narrative. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 12, 1–4.
- de Jong, Ruud, Mariët Theune (2018). Going Dutch: Creating SimpleNLG-NL. In E. Krahmer, A. Gatt, & M. Goudbeek (Eds.), Proceedings of The 11th International Natural Language Generation Conference (pp. 73-78). [W18-6508] Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)., pp. 73-78.
- Muiser, Iwe, Mariët Theune, Ruud de Jong, Nigel Smink, Dolf Trieschnigg, Djoerd Hiemstra, Theo Meder (2018). Supporting the Exploration of Online Cultural Heritage Collections: The Case of the Dutch Folktale Database. In Digital humanities quarterly, 11(4).