Menno van Zaanen received his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, UK in 2002. He holds Master degrees in both computer science and linguistics. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research concentrates on empirical grammatical inference and its applications. He worked and is still working on several projects dealing with structure in different modalities, multi-modal information retrieval, question answering, and symbolic machine learning for language and music. He has taught courses on a range of topics, including digital heritage, natural language processing, language and speech technology, social intelligence, and information search. He has published on several systems that deal with both clean and noisy linguistic data, such as language independent syntactic structure induction, boundaries in compounds (of different languages), spelling checkers, part-of-speech tagging of Twitter messages, and the identification of patterns in music and text. He is a founding member of the International Community in Grammatical Inference and was chairman between 2007 and 2010. He is International Advisory Committee member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods (ACL-SIGFSM), editorial board member of the CLIN journal, and Associate Editor of the Computational Cognitive Science journal.