College of Graduate Studies
Prof Laurette Pretorius
| College of Graduate Studies | |
|---|---|
| Academic Associate | |
| E-mail: | Laurette.pretorius@gmail.com |
Other
Laurette Pretorius is emeritus professor and extraordinary professor of computer science at the University of South Africa. Before her retirement she led the Unisa Strategic Project: The Unisa Academy of African Languages and Science, the aim of which was to further the intellectualisation of South African languages in the domains of science, technology, academia and education by means of state of the art language technology. She is a member of the Board of the South African Academy of Science and the Arts She is serious about her role as academic citizen in its variety of facets.
She holds postgraduate qualifications in computer science, pure mathematics and applied mathematics from the universities of Stellenbosch, South Africa, Pretoria and North-West. Her research concerns the natural language processing (NLP) of resource-scarce South African languages, which include IsiZulu, Setswana, Northern Sotho and Afrikaans. Her research interests also include the role of natural language and multilingual NLP in semantic computing and ontology development, controlled language for domain-specific precise machine translation and language generation. She has published over 100 articles in scientific journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, has been NRF-rated since 2004 and currently has a B-rating.
She has undertaken extensive research visits to the Xerox Research Centre Europe, France; Tilburg University, The Netherlands; the Department of Computer Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Nasional University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland and the University of Helsinki, Finland.