Dr. Preslav Nakov, Ph.D.

Artificial Intelligence

6A South Hall
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, 94720
email: nakov@cs.berkeley.edu
phone: (510) 643-4806

This is my OLD homepage!
I am now a scientist at QCRI, Qatar Foundation.

Awarded the John Atanasoff Award
by the President of Bulgaria.

Research, publications, CV:

Ph.D. thesis: Using the Web as an Implicit Training Set: Application to Noun Compound Syntax and Semantics (University of California at Berkeley, advisor: Marti Hearst)

Selected publications: [List here]

Curriculum Vitae (ask me for more detailed versions): [EuroPass] [plain]

Research Interests: Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Lexical Semantics, Machine Translation, Web as a Corpus, Bioinformatics, and BioNLP.

Recent Awards

RANLP'2011 Young Researcher Award

Recent and Upcoming Publications

JAIR journal: Improving Statistical Machine Translation for a Resource-Poor Language Using Related Resource-Rich Languages Preslav Nakov, Hwee Tou Ng, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), vol. 44, pp. 179-222, May 2012.

Advances in Bioinformatics Journal: Do Peers See More in a Paper than its Authors? Anna Divoli, Preslav Nakov, and Marti Hearst, Advances in Bioinformatics, accepted June 5, 2012.

EMNLP'2012: Source Language Adaptation for Resource-Poor Machine Translation Pidong Wang, Preslav Nakov, Hwee Tou Ng

ACL'2012: Combining Word-Level and Character-Level Models for Machine Translation Between Closely-Related Languages Preslav Nakov, Jorg Tiedemann

EACL'2012: Feature-rich Part-of-speech Tagging for Morphologically Complex Languages: Application to Bulgarian Georgi Georgiev, Valentin Zhikov, Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova, Preslav Nakov

COLING'2012: Optimizing for Sentence-Level BLEU+1 Yields Short Translations Preslav Nakov, Francisco Guzman, Stephan Vogel *** The proposed fix to PRO has been implemented in Rampion; see also this Adendum to (Gimpel&Smith,2012) ***

WMT'2012: QCRI at WMT12: Experiments in Spanish-English and German-English Machine Translation of News Text Francisco Guzman, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Thabet, Stephan Vogel

ACL'2011: Translating from Morphologically Complex Languages: A Paraphrase-Based Approach Preslav Nakov and Hwee Tou Ng

EMNLP'2011: Large-Scale Noun Compound Interpretation Using Bootstrapping and the Web as a Corpus Su Nam Kim and Preslav Nakov

RANLP'2011: Combining Relational and Attributional Similarity for Semantic Relation Classification Preslav Nakov and Zornitsa Kozareva *** Young Researcher Award ***

Current Program Committees:

2013: ACL'2013, NAACL-HLT'2013, IJCAI'2013, *SEM'2013, RANLP'2013, CICLING'2013, ACL-SRW'2013, MWE'2013, AICCSA'2013.

Ongoing and Recent Activities:

JNLE: Journal of Natural Language Engineering, special issue on the Semantics of Noun Compounds, guest co-editor.

RANLP'2013: Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, co-organizer.

*SEM'2013: Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, area co-chair for Morphology/Semantics Interface.

ACL-SRW'2013: ACL 2013 Student Research Workshop, faculty advisor.

RANLP'2011: Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, co-organizer.

AISB'2011: Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour Convention, track co-chair.

LLMMC'2011: Symposium on Learning Language Models from Multilingual Corpora, co-organizer.

RELMS'2011: Workshop on Relational Models of Semantics, at ACL'2011, co-organizer.

IEKA'2011: Workshop on Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition, at RANLP'2011, co-organizer.

MWE'2011: Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World, at ACL'2011, consulting body.

AIRS'2010: The Sixth Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, publication chair.

MWE'2010: Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Theory to Applications, at COLING'2010, co-organizer.

MWE'2009: Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Identification, Interpretation, Disambiguation and Applications, at ACL/IJCNLP'2009, co-organizer.

SemEval'2013, task #2 on Sentiment Analysis in Twitter, co-organizer.

SemEval'2013, task #4 on Free Paraphrases of Noun Compounds, co-organizer.

SemEval'2010, task #8 on Multi-Way Classification of Semantic Relations Between Pairs of Nominals, co-organizer.

SemEval'2010, task #9 on Noun Compound Interpretation Using Paraphrasing Verbs, co-organizer.

SemEval'2007, task #4 on Classification of Semantic Relations between Nominals, co-organizer.

NLP Reading Group at NUS

Recent Talks at Conferences

Keynote speaker at ICEKMT'2011

Invited speaker at AEPC'2011

Panelist at ROBUS-UNSUP'2012

Panelist at MWE'2011

Tutorial speaker on Web Knowledge Extraction and Applications at RANLP'2011

Recent Talks at Research Institutions

November, 2012: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)

June, 2011: Microsoft Research (USA), Yahoo! Labs (USA), University of Washington (USA), Macquarie University (Australia), University of Otago (New Zealand)

May, 2011: Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany)

March, 2011: University of Saarland (Germany)

February, 2011: University of Heidelberg and HITS gGmbH (Germany)

January, 2011: Max Planck Society (Germany)

December, 2010: The University of Melbourne (Australia)

November, 2010: University of Rome, La Sapienza (Italy)

August, 2010: University of Basel (Switzerland), University of Darmstadt (Germany), and XRCE in Grenoble (France)

July, 2010: NICTA and The University of Melbourne (Australia).

February, 2010: University of Wolverhampton (UK).

January, 2010: University of Cambridge (UK), University of Karlsruhe (Germany), and University of Stuttgart (Germany).

November, 2009: NICT, Kyoto (Japan).

My books (in Bulgarian):