People

Maria Tzevelekou is a Director of Research in ILSP-“Athena” RC and a member of the Scientific Board. She was born in Athens and studied linguistics in Paris -Universite de Paris VII and VIII:

• Licence de linguistique generale,  Universite de Paris VII, 1977.
• Maitrise de linguistique theorique, Universite de Paris VIII. MA thesis : Structuralisme et phenomenologie : Les traces de la phenomenologie dans la theorie linguistique de Jakobson, 1979.
• Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies de linguistique formelle (DEA),  Universite de Paris VII. Thesis title :  L’aspect en grec moderne (1981). 
•  These de doctorat  en linguistique theorique et formelle, Universite de Paris VII. Thesis title : Categorisation lexicale et aspect: le systeme aspectuel du grec moderne (1995).  

 
She worked on several R&D projects on Natural Language Processing: EUROTRA Machine Translation project (1985-1992),  GRAAL (Grammar Resources for Advanced Application of Linguare 1993-1995), MLAP (Multilingual  Application Program 1993-1996) and LSGram (Large Scale Grammars for EC Languages 1993-1996).

During 1996-2007 she was actively involved in the “Education of the Muslim Minority Program”, a large scale educational reform project set up by the Ministry of Education and supervised by the University of Athens. Its aim was the upgrading of educational methods and material in the bilingual minority schools of Western Thrace. Within this project she coordinated the setting up of a language learning curriculum, a language assessment procedure, and a number of CALL systems and textbooks for learning Greek as a second language:

• A knight in the castle of letters and A knight in the castle of words: series of courses for learning Greek as a second language, based on a story written by Eugene Trivizas, (CD-Roms and books).
• Greek-Turkish dictionary of 6000 entries: multimedia system and book
• Basic Grammar of Greek (book)
• Greek-Turkish-English dictionary of 7000 terms, for children of the secondary school
• Listening: a web based system for listening comprehension  
• She also coordinated a large scale research project for language assessment in the primary minority schools of Western Thrace.   

For the period 2002-2003 she gained a Visiting Research Fellowship in the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.

During the period 1995-2002 she taught graduation courses of theoretical linguistics in the department of pre-school education in the University of Athens.  She also taught post-graduation courses on formal semantics in the Ionian University (1998-2001) and the University of Athens and NTUA  (1998-2001).