Current status:
PhD in Computational linguistics.
PhD Title: Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain.
(Interdisciplinary research between Computational Linguistics, Linguistics and Psycholinguistics and NLP)
PhD Supervisors: Prof. Dr. R. Mitkov, Dr. Le An Ha and Richard Evans.
Research Questions:
Text Comprehensibility evaluation in the Crisis Management domain.
Text Simplification and Controlled languages approaches for human readers.
Cross-language and cross-domain trasfer of Controlled language guidelines.
Text Simplification and Controlled languages evaluation from different perspectives.
User requirements for a Controlled language authoring aid.
Researchers who have helped me a lot:
Prof. Dr. Galina Maneva (Associate Professor at the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Dr. Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, University of Colorado School of Medicine, USA)
Dr. Constantin Orasan (Deputy head of the Computational Linguistics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Dr. Anke Buttner (Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK)
Prof. Dr. Albena Vassileva (Professor in French Philology, Sofia University, Bulgaria)
Dr. Lucia Specia (Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Reviewing activities:
NAACL 2012 Workshop on Predicting and improving text readability for target reader populations PITR 2012 (Programme Committee).
International Conference LREC 2012 (Programme Committee).
International Conference CICLing 2012 (additional reviewer).
Student Research Workshop at the International Conference RANLP 2011 (Programme Committee).
International Conference RANLP 2011.
International Conference ACL HLT 2011 (multilinguality track).
International Conference CICLing-2010 (additional reviewer).
Student Research Workshop at the International Conference RANLP'09 (Programme Committee).
International Conference RANLP'09.
International Conference RANLP'07 (additional reviewer).
Invited talks:
Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain. Sheffield University, OAK Group. Sheffield, UK. 22 November 2010.
Computer-Aided Controlled Text Simplification in Crisis Management Domain. Manchester University, NACTEM. Manchester, UK. 19 July 2010.
Text Simplification in Crisis Management. Sofia University. Center for Multi-Cultural Communication. Sofia, Bulgaria. 13 April 2010.
Text Simplification in the Crisis Management Domain: Studies for English and Bulgarian. Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Institute for Parallel Processing. Sofia, Bulgaria. 13 April 2010.
Organising activities:
Organiser of the Student Research Workshop held in conjunction with the International Conference RANLP 2011 (September 2011, Hissarya, Bulgaria).
Assistant of the PC Chair and the local organisers of the International Conference RANLP'11 (September 10-16, 2011, Hissarya, Bulgaria).
Organiser of the Student Research Workshop held in conjunction with the International Conference RANLP'09 (September 14-15, 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria).
Assistant of the PC Chair and the local organisers of the International Conference RANLP'09 (September 14-16, 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria).
Assistant of the local organisers of the International Conference RANLP'07 (September 27-29, 2007, Borovets, Bulgaria).
Programme Committee coordinator of the International Conference RANLP'05 (21-23 September 2005, Borovets, Bulgaria ).
Student helper at the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-2004), Geneve, Switzerland, 21 August 2004.
Student helper at the International Conference "Communication verbale et paraverbale", Sofia, Bulgaria, 22-26 October 2003.
Student helper at Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'03), Borovetc, Bulgaria, 6-13 September 2003.
Teaching:
LN4005 (Erasmus Mundus Master's Course): Computational Linguistics:
Natural Language Generation
LN4004 (Erasmus Mundus Master's Course): Machine Translation and other NLP Applications:
Case study during the lecture on "NLP for Translation" (presented by Prof. Gloria Corpas): Application of Controlled Languages on Translation
Text Complexity and Text Simplification
Rule-based MT III (Sublanguages and Controlled languages for MT)
LN3007: Translating by Computer:
Introductory lecture on Natural Language Ambiguity,
Electronic tools for translators,
Sub-languages and Controlled Languages,
Controlled Languages and Machine Translation
LN2000: Language and the Computer
Conferences and Summer schools attended:
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2011), Hissarya, Bulgaria, 14-19 September 2011.
The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL HLT 2011), Portland, Oregon, June 18–25, 2011.
The 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2010), Uppsala, Sweden, July 11–16, 2010. 7th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2010), Valletta, Malta, 17-23 May 2010.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'09), Borovetc, Bulgaria, 12-18 September 2009.
International Symposium on Data and Sense Mining, Machine Translation and Controlled Languages (ISMTCL), Besancon, France, 1-3 July 2009.
Computational Linguistics UK (CLUK 2008) Colloquium, Oxford, United Kingdom, 11-12 March 2008.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'07), Borovetc, Bulgaria, 23-30 September 2007.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'05), Borovetc, Bulgaria, 18-15 September 2005.
20th International Conference
on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2004), Geneve, Switzerland, 21 August 2004.
16th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2004), Nancy, France, 9-20 August 2004.
International Conference "Communication verbale et paraverbale", Sofia, Bulgaria, 22-26 October 2003.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'03), Borovetc, Bulgaria, 6-13 September 2003.
(and many secret ones)
Language knowledge:
Bulgarian - native language
Russian - native language
Italian - fluent (5 years High school in Italy, 4 year University Education in Italian Philology in Bulgaria)
English - very good (2 years work experience translator for the European Parliament, 3 years in UK)
French - very good (2 years work experience translator for the European Parliament)
German - basic notions (4 months course)
Romanian - basic notions
Greek - basic notions
American English - basic notions :)
Programming languages:
Python, Perl, Turbo Pascal
Operating systems:
Mac OS X, Linux, Microsoft Windows, DOS
Markup Languages:
HTML, XML, LaTeX
Databases:
MySQL (University knowledge)
Professional Experience:
October 2010 - October 2011: Quality Assurance Linguist-specialist for Bulgarian for Appen Butler Hill Ltd.
July 2007 - December 2011: Part-time main Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Natural Language Engineering.
October 2005 - June 2007: Full-time translator from English, French, Italian into Bulgarian and Russian for the European Parliament (Luxembourg).
November 2004 - September 2005: Research assistant at the Linguistic Modelling Departement, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
October 2004 - August 2005: Italian Language teacher in Astra Language School;
15 March 2004 -15 June 2004: Research trainee at the Language Technology Group, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen, European Commission's Joint Research Center (Ispra, Italy) - contributions to two multilingual text analysis tools that provide cross-lingual information access - a tool for the automatic recognition of products mentionned in free text (made improvements for English and Italian) and one for cross-lingual (English - Italian and English - French) topic tracking of news stories; production of text analysis resources for Bulgarian and Russian languages.
November 1998 - October 2005: Freelance Italian translator and interpreter.
October 1996 - December 1996: Tour guide for Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa - "Il Compasso" mathematics exhibition.