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Professor Dr Ruslan Mitkov

I completed my university degree at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany where I studied from 1974 to 1979. I was privileged to have as my doctoral supervisor one of the pioneers of the German Computer Science, Prof Dr Nikolaus Joachim Lehmann at the Technical University of Dresden where I received my PhD on 9 January 1987, Germany. I joined the University of Wolverhampton on 2 October 1995. Since 1997, I am Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering and the same year I founded the Research Group in Computational Linguistics which I have led ever since. I am Director of the Research Institute for Information and Language Processing which consists of two internationally renowned research groups – Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group led by Prof. Mike Thelwall and the Research Group in Computational Linguistics.

Prior to coming to Wolverhampton, I was Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Science. I was also Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1993, and 1994, at the Saarland University and University of Hamburg.

I was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from Plovdiv University in 2011 and Professor Honoris Causa from Veliko Tarnovo University in 2014. 

I am / have been working on a variety of topics in Natural Language Processing and so far I have authored or co-authored more than 240 publications. I am still interested in (and involved in research on) anaphora resolution and the automatic generation of multiple-choice tests - topics for which I have been extensively cited.  Recent topics which I have researched and published include translation memory, computational treatment of multiword expressions, sentiment analysis, language change, readability, simplification and NLP for people with language disabilities. Previous topics include but are not limited to automatic identification of cognates and false friends, machine translation, the use of NLP methodology and corpora to verify the validity of translation universals, bilingual term extraction, textual similarity, text summarisation, centering, question answering, temporal processing, CALL and annotation of corpora. The University of Wolverhampton has an open repository - WIRE - where a selection of my recent publications can be searched for by name and downloaded freely. WIRE also lists all my past publications.

I am author of the book Anaphora resolution published by Longman, and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press). Currently I am working on the second and substantially revised edition of this Handbook which is close to completion and will be published in 2019. Many of the chapters have already been published online.

I have been principal investigator and/or have played a key role in a number of projects funded by the British Research Councils, EC programmes, US organisations and UK industry. These include the EC funded projects FIRST (FP7), EXPERT (FP7 Marie Curie ITN), TELL ME, QALL-ME, the AHRC-funded projects DVC and CAST and the ESRC-funded project BIRD and various projects funded by the National Board of Medical Examiners (USA).

 

I am Coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Master programme ‘Technology for Translation and Interpreting’.

Currently I give lectures on this programme as well as the other two Master programmes run by the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing: Computational Linguistics as well as Practical Corpus Linguistics for ELT, Lexicography and Translation.

I am invited to give lectures at overseas Master programmes which include Traducción para el Mundo Editorial at the University of Malaga and Lenguas y Tecnología at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. I also regularly give lectures different European Universities as part of Erasmus+ agreements.

I supervise postgraduate students researching in different areas of Computational Linguistics Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation and Corpus Linguistics and so far have had 20 PhD students who successfully completed their PhD degrees. 

I often act as an external examiner of PhD theses in Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Translation and Translation Technology at UK and overseas universities and have examined more than 40 PhD theses. I have been external examiner of MSc degrees in Translation Studies and Translation Technology at Imperial College, London, Exeter University and University of Swansea.

Recent successful PhD supervisions:

  • Gender Variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic, Najah Albaqawi, 2020
  • Sentence Simplification for Text Processing, Richard Evans, 2020
  • Collection and Preparation of Multilingual Data for Multiple Corpus-based Approaches to Translations, Hernani Costa (at the University of Malaga, as part of the EC-funded EXPERT project)
  • Building relevance judgments list for a test collection without using human intervention, Mireille Makary, 2019
  • Automatic identification and translation of Multiword Expressions, Shiva Taslimipoor, 2018
  • AUTOR: Assessing Text and Web Accessibility for People with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Victoria Yaneva, 2016
  • Use of Language Technology to Improve Matching and Retrieval in Translation Memory, Rohit Gupta, 2016
  • New data-driven approaches to text simplification, Sanja Stajner, 2015
  • Measuring semantic similarity of texts, Miguel Angel Rios Gaona, 2014
  • Modelling and using context knowledge for statistical machine translation, Wilker Aziz, 2014
  • Question generation from video documents, Yvonne Skalban, 2013
  • A study on plagiarism detection and plagiarism direction identification using natural language processing techniques, Miranda Chong, 2013
  • Knowledge acquisition from Wikipedia for interactive QA, Natalia Konstantinova, 2013
  • A Machine Learning Approach to the Identification of Translational Language: An Inquiry into Translationese Learning Models, Iustina-Narcisa Ilisei, 2013
  • Collaborative encyclopaedias for question answering, Iustin Dornescu, 2012
  • NLP approaches to text simplification, Irina Temnikova, 2012
  • Unsupervised relation extraction for e-learning applications, Naveed Afzal, 2011
  • Temporal processing of news and its impact on question answering, Georgiana Puscasu, 2011
  • Advances in Automatic Terminology Processing: Methodology and application in focus, Le An Ha, 2007
  • From extracts to abstracts: Human summary production operations for computer-aided summarization, Laura Hasler, 2007
  • Comparative evaluation of modular automatic summarisation systems using CAST, Constantin Orasan, 2006
  • Resolución automática de anáfora indirecta en el español, Raul Morales Carrasco, 2004
  • Bilingual Pronoun Resolution: Experiments in English and French, Catalina Barbu, 2003

I am Programme Chair of the biennial international conference ‘Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing’ (RANLP) since 1995. Last year the conference (RANLP’2017) took place in Varna from 4 to 6 September 2017 and the next edition will take place again in Varna early September 2019.

Since 1996 I am also conference chair for the annual conference ‘Translating and the Computer’ which takes place every November in London. This year’s conference (TC40) will take place on November 2018.

Since 2013 I am one of the chairs of the (so far biennial) international workshop ‘Multiword units in Machine Translation and Translation Technology’ (MUMTTT’2017).  The last edition of the workshop will take place on 14 November 2017 in London.

Last year I was also Chair of the international conference ‘Computational and corpus-based approaches to phraseology’ (Europhras’2017) which took place on 13 and 14 November 2017 in London.

I was Co-Chair of the Programme Committee of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP’2013) which took place in October 2013 in Nagoya, Japan.

I am member of the Programme Committee of various international conferences. 

I am regular keynote speaker at international conferences. This year  (2018) my keynote speeches include a plenary talk at CLIB’2018 (Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria) conference (Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2018), plenary talk at the 1st Latinamerican conference on translation and phraseology (Lima, Peru, September 2018), keynote speech at the International Conference on Multidisciplinary and Multicultural Discourses (Castellon, Spain, October 2018), plenary talk at International Symposium Parallel Corpora: Creation and Applications PaCOR 2018 (Madrid, November 2017)  and keynote speech at the 2nd International Workshop on Discourse, Multimodality and Experimental Methods (Viña del Mar, Chile, November 2018).

In recent years I have been keynote speaker at a number of international events. My keynote speeches include presentations at  the 1st International Conference on Corpus Analysis in Academic Discourse (Valencia, Spain, November 2017), the 1st Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (Varna, Bulgaria, September 2017), the 15th Conference on Translation, Text and Interference (Jaén, July 2017, Spain), the 1st Colombian conference on Computational and Corpus linguistics (Bogota, May 2017), the EACL’2017 (European Association of Computational Linguistics) workshop Second Workshop on Coreference Resolution beyond OntoNotes, CARBON 2017 (Valencia, April 2017),the international colloquium "New trends in translation and interpreting", the 8th seminar on Language Engineering (Mexico City, September 2016),  the LREC’2016 Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC), (Portorož, Slovenia, May 2016), the annual International Conference of the European Association of Phraseology Europhras’2015 "Computerised and Corpus-based Approaches to Phraseology: Monolingual and Multilingual Perspectives" (Malaga, Spain, June, 2015),  the International conference of the Iberian Association for Translation (AIETI’2015), (Malaga, January, 2015), the international Conference Phraseology, Variations/Diathopy, Translation (Alicante, October 2014), the International Conference of the European Association of Phraseology Europhras’2014 (Paris, France, September 2014), the International conference on Meaning and Knowledge Representation, (Valencia, Spain, July 2014), the International conference on Translation and Interpreting, (Baeza, Spain, July 2014) and the International Nooj2014 conference (Sassari, Italy, June 2014), the Text, Speech and Dialogue Conference TSD’12 (Brno, Czech republic, September 2012), the LREC workshop on Natural Language Processing for  Improving Textual Accessibility  (Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012), the international workshop “Embracing new challenges in building and using linguistic resources and tools” (Salerno, Italy, May 2012), the international symposium ‘Sociología de las Palabras’ (Murcia, Spain, December 2011), the anniversary seminar at Imperial College (London, UK, November, 2010), the conference of the Spanish Association of Natural Language Processing SEPLN’2010 (Valencia, Spain, September 2010), the 5th Latin American Congress on Translation and Interpretation (Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2010), the international workshop ‘Language Technology in Action’, (Nijmegen, Holland, April 2010), the conference of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics AESLA2010 (Vigo, Spain, April 2010) and NLP-INFOS2010 (Cairo, Egypt, March 2010).

 

A selection of earlier keynote speeches include talks at the conference on coreference in Romance languages (Barcelona, November 2008), the BCS Corpus Profiling workshop (London, UK, October 2008), the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Conference DAARC-2007 (Lagos, Portugal, March 2007), the anniversary conference of the Association of Swiss Translators (Bern, Switzerland, September 2006), the Special Track on Automatic Annotation by Categories for Text Information Extraction at the 19th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (Melbourne Beach Florida, USA, May 2006), the 10th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems NLDB 2005 (Alicante, Spain, June 2005), the CLUK-04 conference (Birmingham, UK, January 2004), the International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering IEEE NLP-KE'2003 (Beijing, China, October 2003), the International NLP conference PorTAL (Faro, Portugal, June 2002), the International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing CICLing-2002 (Mexico City, February 2002), the International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing CICLing-2001 (Mexico City, February, 2001), the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Conference DAARC-2000 (Lancaster, UK, November 2000), the the conference of the Spanish Association for Natural Language Processing SEPLN'98 (Alicante, Spain, September 1998), the International Colloquium on Anaphora and Anaphora resolution, DAARC (Lancaster, UK, July 1996).

 

I have also given a number of invited talks at universities and research centres. 

I have been invited to act as evaluator of the research projects for a number of national and international research and funding councils and evaluator for research quality, performance and promotion for a number of universities in different countries including the UK, USA, Canada, France, Spain, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Dubai.

I am Vice-President of ASLING, the Association for Promotion of Language Technology, based in Geneva.

In addition to the aforementioned roles, I am particularly proud that I initiated the extracurricular activities in mathematical and computational linguistics in Bulgaria in 1983; I was director of the national network running these activities until the late 1990s. I organised and chaired competitions (including the first international competitions), courses, summer schools and seminars. The extracurricular activities in mathematical and computational linguistics in Bulgaria gave rise to many successful future computational linguists. I am delighted to report that I shall be chairing the exhibition competition as part of the forthcoming conference ‘Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria’ (CLIB’2018). I even composed several problems for this competition (the problems will be published on this website after the competition)!