About Us

The Company

Theta Bridge LLC was founded by two linguists, Eric Stenshoel and Gerry Dempsey. Eric contributes a unique approach to meaning-based representation, while Gerry provides practical experience in commercial translation. Together, they develop groundbreaking products for the tech and government sectors.

Our company name combines the word bridge with the Greek letter theta (Θ). In linguistic theory, a theta role is the role played by each participant in a semantic representation. The combination expresses the idea of a universal semantic representation that can bridge all natural languages. The image of the bridge embedded in our logo was created by Freepik-Flaticon. 

Eric Stenshoel

Chief Linguist

Eric studied economics and foreign languages at Harvard, then went on to practice intellectual property law in Manhattan. During this time he cultivated a growing interest in comparative syntax, which led to graduate work in linguistics, a dissertation, and a PhD.

Still practicing IP law, Eric refined his research program. He was not satisfied with attempts to account for semantic data within the received model of universal syntactic structures. Instead, he explored the possibility of building a semantic structure that could account for syntactic data.

His dissertation proposed a universal semantic structure combined with two principles and a parametric mechanism. He showed how this model could account for dative alternation, source/goal asymmetry, the generation and distribution of definite and indefinite articles, the selection of auxiliary verbs, and other linguistic conundrums.

Further refinements uncovered explanations for more and more linguistic phenomena. It soon became clear that Eric's universal semantic structure could be the basis for a new tool for natural language processing -- a universal semantic generator -- whose operations are fueled by meaning rather than statistical analysis of existing corpora.

Gerry Dempsey

Chief Executive

At age 17, Gerry was doing basic research on machine translation at Georgetown. His first job out of college was translating private communications among the global affiliates of one of the world's biggest banks.

He later ran a European financial news service in Paris, then founded an international advertising agency in Tribeca. His company created multilingual marketing campaigns for high-profile clients like American Express, UPS, Ford, and New York City. He eventually sold the agency to Berlitz.

Gerry met Eric Stenshoel in graduate school, where they took the same course in machine translation: Gerry was looking for better output, while Eric was searching for a better model. His unorthodox semantics intrigued Gerry, who engaged in a long series of conversations with Eric as he developed the seminal ideas that have grown into the Universal Semantic Generator.

Gerry is now working with Eric to create a demonstration version of the universal semantic generator for the public. They intend to offer access to the invention to potential collaborators beginning in 2024.