György Szépe

After graduating from university, he began his work at the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He played an important role in the establishment of the Mathematical Linguistics Research Group at the Computer Science Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1963, in whose weekly seminars the latest results of general linguistics were processed by domestic researchers in the subject.

In 1964, at the Faculty of Humanities of ELTE, together with Ferenc Kiefer, they launched the Mathematical (later named General and Applied) Linguistics department. Within this framework, humanities students studied programming for the first time in Hungary.

He brought about the meeting of supply and demand when in 1966 the National Technical Library and Documentation Center (OMKDK) commissioned the MTA Computer Center to create KWICK indexes from four types of specialized literature. This was the first time in Hungary that natural language (Hungarian) texts were processed by computer, almost on an industrial scale. The work was carried out by the Machine Linguistics Group of the MTA Computer Center (by commission) which he led. The practically useful result helped to strengthen the position of the research group, which then, based on the ideas of Bálint Dömölki and Dénes Vargha, and led by the latter, was able to be at the forefront of the world in the field of machine translation for a year or two.

From 1982 he established the Department of Linguistics as a professor at the Janus Pannonius University of Pécs (JPTE). In addition to the Pécs School of Linguistics, he also founded a doctoral program, in which he worked almost until his death. From 1982 he was a university professor (later professor emeritus) at the JPTE, from 2000 he was a private tutor at the ELTE BTK. From 2008 he was a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences established the Szépe György Publication Award in 2014, with the aim of encouraging its researchers to achieve high-quality international publication performance.