Prof. Dr. Martin Volk
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Martin Volk *1961 †2025
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Martin Volk studied education and artificial intelligence at EWH University in Koblenz, Germany and at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA., where he received a Master’s degree. After a stay as a research assistant at the Siemens Research and Technology Lab in Princeton, N.J., he became a research assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Koblenz, Germany, where he received his PhD in 1994.
From 1994 to 2001, he was a Postdoc in the Computational Linguistics Group at UZH in Zurich. After receiving his habilitation from UZH and further employments as a lecturer, researcher and project leader in the Zurich area, he became a professor of Computational Linguistics at Stockholm University in Sweden in 2003.
In 2008, he re-joined UZH as a professor of Computational Linguistics at UZH’s Department of Computational Linguistics. From 2015 to 2024, he was the department head. Since 2019, he has held a double affiliation with the Department of Computational Linguistics and the Department of Informatics.
The focus of his academic work was on multilingual language processing, with a particular emphasis on machine translation and the application of language technology in the digital humanities. Through his research in the digital humanities, he built bridges between disciplines. His passion for the field inspired many students to pursue studies in computational linguistics.
His research also contributed to the development of practical machine translation systems, notably through the UZH spin-off TextShuttle (now Supertext AG), which he co-founded.
Martin Volk passed away on September 15, 2025 at the age of 64 after a sudden, severe illness. All who knew him will not only remember his scientific achievements, but also his smile, his sense of humor, his constructive attitude to problem solving and his warm way of interacting with all of us.
Martin Glinz (Department Head, 2007-2016)