Ruslan Mitkov

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. 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 270 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. Dr Mitkov is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press, co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the Oxford Handbook of Phraseology Linguistics (Oxford University Press, co-authored with Gloria Corpas and Jean-Pierre Colson). 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 Coordinator (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. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering 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 and members of the group have won awards at different NLP/shared-task competitions and conferences. 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 and Director of the Responsible Digital Humanities Lab. The Research Institute consists of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics and the Research Group in Statistical Cybermetrics, which is another top performer internationally. 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 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. In October 2022 Prof R Mitkov is to receive the title ‘Doctor Honoris Cause’ for the third time, this time to be awarded by New Bulgarian University, Sofia.

Deep Learning for Phraseology

We are living in a Deep Learning (DL) world where most developments in the field of Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence benefit from a host of DL techniques. Computational Phraseology certainly cannot lag behind in this trend. This keynote speech will report on several studies carried out by the speaker and members of his research group in which state-of-the-art DL techniques are employed to solve challenging problems in Phraseology.

To begin, the speaker will outline a project which developed and implemented a DL-based methodology for the automatic extraction and translation of multiword expressions (MWEs). The speaker will also report the results of an enlightening study associated with the above project and which also employed the aforementioned methodology to answer the perennial question: what matters more – the size of the corpus or its quality?

The keynote speech will proceed to outline other DL projects related to Phraseology on which the speaker and colleagues from his research group have worked in the past two years. In one of them, he will introduce a novel method for tagging MWEs using a linguistically interpretable language-independent Deep Learning architecture. More specifically, this study shows, for the first time, how Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) can be successfully applied to MWE identification, especially to tackle discontinuous multiword expressions.  The speaker will also present the first ‘MWE-aware’ metaphor identification system in which the GCN-supported classification of metaphors is enhanced by informing the model of the presence of MWEs. Finally, the keynote speech will outline latest work carried out by (involving) the speaker and members of his group. Latest work includes the employment of state-of-the-art neural transformers in the task of detecting MWEs; and in addition and more specifically, the employment of state-of-the-art neural transformers to detect MWEs in flower and plant names. Recent work on using transformers for identification of idioms will be also outlined; so will be a recent study on the impact of detection of MWEs for the NLP application author identification.