NLP and Language Disabilities
Abstract
While the presentation will cover the topic of how Natural Language Processing tools can be applied to assist language disabilities in general, its main focus will be FIRST - an on-going EC FP7-funded project coordinated by the University of Wolverhampton in which the speaker proposed the original methodology on which the project is based. The invited talk will start with a brief survey of the employment of NLP to assist people with language disabilities; in particular, the benefit of text simplification will be discussed. Next, the objectives and the methodology of FIRST will be presented, the results on the project to date will be reported and planned work and activities will be summarised. Finally, other on-going and forthcoming work of the speaker and his Research Group related to the topic of the presentation, will be outlined.
Ruslan Mitkov: short bio
Prof. Dr. Ruslan Mitkov has been working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and related areas since the early 1980s. His research output was highlighted as being internationally leading in the last UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008). Whereas Prof. 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 170 publications including 9 books, 21 journal articles and 20 book chapters) also covers topics such as machine translation, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centering, translation memory, evaluation, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, and NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals. Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press). Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press), Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Language Processing book series of John Benjamins publishers, and Consulting Editor of Oxford University Press publications in Computational Linguistics. He is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the forthcoming second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Prof. Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences. He has acted as Programme Chair of various 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. Dr. Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit and is currently managing several large projects, some of which 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. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995 and where he set up the Research Group in Computational Linguistics. His Research Group has emerged as an internationally leading unit in applied Natural Language Processing (the output of the Research Group was classed by RAE 2008 as internationally leading, internationally excellent and internationally recognised) and members of the group have won awards in different NLP/shared-task competitions. In addition to being Head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics, Prof. Mitkov is also Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing. The Research Institute consists of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics and the Research Group in Statistical Cybermetrics, which is another top performer in the recent RAE. In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof. Mitkov is to be awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in November 2011.
