Agata Savary

Professor in computer science
Université Paris-Saclay
LISN (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique)
IUT d'Orsay (University Institute of Technology)
https://perso.lisn.upsaclay.fr/savary/

Prof dr Agata Savary is a professor in computer science at the Paris-Saclay University in France. She holds a MSc from the University of Warsaw in Poland, a PhD from the University of Marne-la-Vallée in France, and a Habilitation from the University of Tours in France. She has been dealing with multilingual NLP for 3 decades. Her domains of interest include natural language processing (NLP), universalist and NLP-applicable modelling of idiomaticity in language, as well as construction of language resources and tools for multiword expression identification, named entity recognition, and coreference resolution.

She chairs the CA21167 COST action UniDive (Universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology, 2022-2026), which counts over 300 members from 37 countries.

In the past she also served as the chair of the IC1207 COST action PARSEME (PARSing and Multiword Expressions, 2013-2017), an elected representative of the Multiword Expressions section at SIGLEX, a co-editor-in-chief of the "Phraseology and Multiword Expressions" book series at Language Science Press, and a coordinator of the Dagstuhl Seminar on the "Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics". She authored 20 refereed journal papers, 40 conference papers, 20 workshop papers, and 10 book chapters.

Svetla Koeva

Professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Director of the Institute for Bulgarian Language
Chair of the Department of Computational Linguistics
http://dcl.bas.bg/news/svetla-koeva/

Dr Svetla Koeva is a professor of Computational Linguistics and the head of the Department of Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests lie in the field of computational linguistics, formal description of language: morphology and syntax, lexical-semantic networks and ontologies. She is the principal investigator in the development of various language resources for Bulgarian such as: Bulgarian WordNet, Bulgarian National Corpus, text processing chain, etc.

Svetla Koeva has published 5 books and over 200 research publications. She has lead numerous research projects among which currently are: Assessing reading literacy and comprehension of early graders in Bulgaria and Italy and Enriching the Semantic Network WordNet with Conceptual Frames, and the successfully finished projects in the last two years are: European Lexicographic Infrastructure, Multilingual Image Corpus (MIC 21), The ontology of the stative situations in the models of language, Curated Multilingual Language Resources for CEF.AT,. Since 2013 Svetla Koeva leads the project The Written Word Remains. Write Correctly! for promoting the study and research of the Bulgarian language. She also is the head of the National Competence Centre at the European Language Grid.

She served as the Director of the Institute for Bulgarian Language from 2012 until 2021. Currently she is the chair of the Research Council of the Institute for Bulgarian Language since 2021. Svetla Koeva is also the editor in chief of the Annual Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language and the weekly edition The Written Word Remains. Write Correctly!. Svetla Koeva has been awarded five prizes by the National Science Fund at the Ministry of Education and Science and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Ruslan Mitkov

Lancaster University and University of Alicante
Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering
Director of the Erasmus Mundus Programme on Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM TTI)
Executive Editor of the journal ‘Natural Language Processing’ (Cambridge University Press)
Programme Chair of the RANLP conference series
https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/mitkov

Prof Dr Ruslan Mitkov is Professor in Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, one of the top-10 UK universities. Prior to joining Lancaster University, Prof Mitkov worked at the University of Wolverhampton where he created and led the internationally leading Research Group in Computational Linguistics, and was also Director of the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing as well as Director of the Responsible Digital Humanities Lab. Prof Mitkov is also Distinguished Professor at the University of Alicante, Spain.

Dr 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, automatic generation of multiple-choice tests and new generation translation memory systems, his extensively cited research (more than 320 publications including 15 books, 35 journal articles and 35 book chapters) also includes but is not limited to topics such as computational phraseology, machine translation, natural language processing for language disabilities, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals and text simplification. His recent research includes the employment of Deep Learning, Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence in Natural Language Processing, Translation Technology, Linguistics and language research in general. Prof Mitkov is not only known for his original research outputs with high scientific impact, but also known for his vision and innovative applied research which seeks to enhance the work efficiency of different professions (teachers, translators and interpreters) or seeks to improve the quality of life (people with disabilities).

Prof Mitkov is author of the monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford University Press) which has been hailed as the most successful Oxford Handbook and whose second, substantially revised edition was published in June 2022. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering) published by 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.

Prof Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at more than 240 international conferences (28 keynote speeches in 2024 only) and is/has been Chair of more than 70 conferences on Natural Language Processing, Translation Technology and Applied Linguistics topics. He is editor of more than 15 volumes published by Springer and John Benjamins.

Mitkov designed and 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.

Prof Mitkov has been an external examiner of many doctoral theses and curricula in the UK and abroad, including Master’s programmes related to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Translation and Translation Technology.

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. He is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, 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.

Ruslan Mitkov is Vice President of AsLing an international Association for promoting Language Technology.

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 three times.

Cvetana Krstev

Professor of Informatics at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology (retired)
President of the Language Resources and Technologies Society (JeRTeh)
https://poincare.matf.bg.ac.rs/~cvetana/

Prof. Dr. Cvetana Krstev is a retired professor of Informatics at the Department of Librarianship and Informatics, University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology. Her scientific field is Human Language Technologies (HLT). She has published one book and more than 200 scientific papers, most related to natural language processing, more specifically to language resources development and their application. She has developed the Serbian morphological e-dictionary and was one of the key contributors to the development of the Serbian WordNet, Serbian monolingual and aligned multilingual corpora, the named-entity recognition system for Serbian, as well as systems for automatic text correction, for various text transformations, corpus-lexicon interaction and many other language resources and tools.

She participated in several international and national projects related to language resources and technology. Also, she is the president and one of the initiators and founder-members of the Language Resources and Technologies Society (JeRTeh). She also is the head of the National Competence Centre at the European Language Grid. She was MC and a significant contributor to the COST actions: PARSEME (PARSing and Multiword Expressions, 2013-2017), D-Reading (Distant Reading for European Literary History, 2017-2021) and currently leading activities as MC in UNIDIVE COST action (Universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology, 2022-2026).