Organisers & contacts

Galia Angelova,

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria

(OC Chair)

Galia Angelova studied Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and received her PhD from MTA SZTAKI (Computer and Automation Institute at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Her major fields of research are: knowledge-based natural language processing including analysis of clinical patient records in Bulgarian language, analysis of image tags and automatic tag sense recognition; data analytics and visualization; intelligent management of digital content. Prof. Angelova was the coordinator or principal investigator of more than 25 projects with international or national funding. In 2012-2016 she coordinated the project AComIn “Advanced Computing for Innovation”, a 3.2 MEuro grant with the European Commission, FP7 Capacity, included by the European Commission in the book “Achievements of FP7: examples that make us proud”. Galia Angelova has strong inclination towards building practical applications with integration of large-scale NLP. In 2015, together with medical experts from the University Specialized Hospital for Active Treatment of Endocrinology (USHATE) “Acad. Ivan Penchev”, Medical University Sofia, her group generated automatically a National Diabetes Register, based on a large repository of outpatient records submitted to the Bulgarian National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF). Today the Register is hosted by USHATE, updated yearly with information extracted automatically from NHIF outpatient records for the respective year. Especially elaborated text extractors analyze free text fragments in the outpatient records and deliver to the Register values of clinical indicators: blood sugar, glycated hemoglobin, blood pressure, body-mass index etc.

Ruslan Mitkov

Lancaster University, UK

(PC Chair)

Ruslan Mitkov is Professor of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He has been working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and related areas since the early 1980s. Whereas Prof Dr Mitkov is best known for his seminal contributions to the areas of anaphora resolution and automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, his extensively cited research (more than 280 publications including 20 books, 35 journal articles and 40 book chapters) also covers topics such as deep learning for NLP, machine translation, translation memory and translation technology in general, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, evaluation, corpus annotation, NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals, text simplification, NLP for people with language disorders and computational phraseology. In addition, Ruslan Mitkov is well known for his vision in research based on innovative ideas and drive towards research output which seeks to enhance the work efficiency of different professions (e.g. for teachers, translators and interpreters) or seeks to improve the quality of life (e.g. for people with language disabilities) and which has significant impact beyond academia. Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and Editor of the most successful Oxford University Press Handbook – The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics whose second and substantially revised edition was published in June 2022. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering published by Cambridge University Press and Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers. Prof Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at more than 200 international conferences. He has acted as Chair or Programme Chair of more than 65 international conferences on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation, Translation Technology, Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Anaphora Resolution. He is asked on a regular basis to review for leading international funding bodies and organisations and to act as a referee for applications for Professorships both in North America and Europe. Ruslan Mitkov is regularly asked to review for leading journals, publishers and conferences and serve as a member of Programme Committees or Editorial Boards. Prof Mitkov has been an external examiner of many doctoral theses and curricula in the UK and abroad, including Master’s programmes related to NLP, Translation and Translation Technology. Prof Mitkov is Director of the first and only Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programme in Technology for Translation and Interpreting – an innovative and inspirational programme, with a strong research focus but an equally strong emphasis on business; leading companies in the global translation and language industry participate as associated partners. Dr Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit (more than £ 20,000,000) and has been Principal Investigator of 25 projects, are funded by UK research councils, by the EC as well as by companies and users from the UK and USA. Ruslan Mitkov received his MSc from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. Before jining Lancaster University, Mitkov was Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995 and where he set up the internationally leading Research Group in Computational Linguistics. Ruslan Mitkov is Vice President of ASLING, an international Association for promoting Language Technology. Dr Mitkov is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, was a Marie Curie Fellow, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France and Distinguished Visiting Researcher at the University of Malaga, Spain; he also serves/has served as Vice-Chair for the prestigious EC funding programmes ‘Future and Emerging Technologies’ and ‘EIC Pathfinder Open’. In September 2022 the renowned National Board of Medical Examiners (USA) presented Prof Mitkov with a certificate of distinguished collaboration which resulted in lasting impact on the strategic planning and decision making of the US organisation and their employment of NLP solutions to assessment for the last 17 years. In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof Mitkov was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in November 2011. At the end of October 2014 Dr Mitkov was also conferred Professor Honoris Causa at Veliko Tarnovo University and on 25 October 2022 Prof R Mitkov received the title ‘Doctor Honoris Cause’ for the third time, this time awarded by New Bulgarian University, Sofia.