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 250 publications including 15 books, 35 journal articles and 36 book chapters) also covers topics such as 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 disabilities and computational phraseology.

Dr Mitkov 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 (more than є 20,000,000) and is currently acting as Principal Investigator of 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.

Description:
The talk will present three original methodologies developed by the speaker, underpinning implemented Language Technology tools which are already having an impact on the following areas of society: e-learning, translation and interpreting and care for people with language disabilities.
The first part of the presentation will introduce an original methodology and tool for generating multiple-choice tests from electronic textbooks. The application draws on a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques which include term extraction, semantic computing and sentence transformation. The presentation will include an evaluation of the tool which demonstrates that generation of multiple-choice tests items with the help of this tool is almost four times faster than manual construction and the quality of the test items is not compromised. This application benefits e-learning users (both teachers and students) and is an example of how NLP can have a positive societal impact, in which the speaker passionately believes.
The talk will go on to outline two other original recent projects which are also related to the application of NLP beyond academia. First, a project, whose objective is to develop next-generation translation memory tools for translators and, in the near future, for interpreters, will be briefly presented. Finally, an original methodology and system will be outlined which helps users with autism to read and better understand texts. The presentation will finish with a brief outline of the latest (and forthcoming) research topics (to be) pursued by the speaker.