NLP augmenting translation and interpreting

Dr. Claudio Fantinuoli is researcher and lecturer at the Mainz University/Germany and Head of Innovation at KUDO Inc. He conducts research in the field of Natural Language Processing applied to computer-assisted interpreting and automatic speech translation. He also teaches conference interpreting. In the past, he taught Technology and Interpreting at the University of Innsbruck and at the Postgraduate Center of the University of Vienna. He is the founder of InterpretBank, an AI-based tool for conference interpreters.

www.claudiofantinuoli.org

Prof. dr. Veronique Hoste is senior full professor of Computational Linguistics at Ghent University and head of the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication. She director of the LT³ language and Translation Technology Team, which currently counts about 25 researchers in the domain of natural language processing. Since October 2018, she is research director of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Veronique holds a PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Antwerp on Optimization Issues in machine learning of coreference resolution (2005). Based on the conviction that shallow representations based on lexical information are not sufficient to model text understanding, Veronique and the LT3 team have always heavily invested in (often cross-lingual) research on (cross-document) coreference resolution, event detection, etc. and in applications exploiting these deeper text representations, such as readability prediction, aspect-based sentiment analysis, irony detection, etc.

https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/veronique.hoste

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.

Antonio Toral is Assistant Professor in Language Technology at the University of Groningen. He holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the Universitat d'Alacant and has carried out research in the area of machine translation (MT) since 2010. His research interests include the application of MT to literary texts, MT for under-resourced languages, and the analysis of translations produced by machines and humans.