Alexander Ziem has joined the FrameNet project through our German visiting program, which is funded by the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD).

Alexander studied at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, and also studied abroad at the University of Melbourne. He has worked in various teaching and research positions at the Universities of Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bremen, and Basel, in Switzerland. He received his doctorate from Düsseldorf in 2007; his thesis has been translated into English and was published as a book by de Gruyter in 2008. His thesis used frames of understanding to study phenomena such as the emergence and variation of word meanings and metaphors in texts. He was also a PI for a project that studied how newspapers have presented different crises in Germany over several decades. The project built software that relied on both qualitative and quantitative analysis to understand how complex ideas are explained, looking at what different and recurring conceptual metaphors, keywords, and argument structures were used in writing about crises. Since 2011 he has been the director of the graduate program "The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science" in Düsseldorf.

While at ICSI, he will study associative anaphora, which is an expression in text or speech that is anchored in a previously mentioned concept. For example, in the sentence "Let's go to the car; I have the key," the word "key" is an associative anaphor indirectly referring to the concept of car. The goal is also to fully annotate a text and display his annotation using a "FrameNet Constructicon," which is based on ideas from FrameNet but also incorporates construction grammar.

Alexander is here with his wife and two children (a 2-month-old girl and a 4-year-old boy). Alexander enjoys jogging and swimming, and used to play tennis and soccer. His wife is a producer of children's shows in Germany.