Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street
Sheffield S1 4DP
phone : (0114) 222 1930 www : http://dcs.shef.ac.uk/~kalina
fax :(0114) 222 1810
| Surname | Bontcheva |
| Fornames | Kalina |
| January 2002 | PhD in Computer Science Title: “Generating Adaptive Computer Science Department, University of Sheffield |
| 1996-99 | Postgraduate student Computer Science Department, University of Sheffield Supervisor: Prof. Y. Wilks |
| 1995 | Visiting student at the Natural Language Group CS Department, Hamburg University |
| 1990–95 | BSc. + MSc. in Computer Science, University of Sofia |
| 1990–93 | Sofia English Language College graduated as a private student) |
| 1985–90 | Sofia Central Mathematics College |
| July 1999- | Senior Researcher, involved in:
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| August 2003 | Visiting researcher Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University |
| Sept-Dec 2000 | Part-time Teaching (incl. 4 lectures) ‘Programming and Problem Solvingin Java’ course Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
| 1998–99 | Part-time Teaching Assistant Several Java courses for undergraduate and MSc students, including programming, HCI, and software engineering Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
| 1997 | Part-time Teaching Assistant for Modula-2 and C courses Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
| 1995-96 | Researcher on Language Generation and Machine Aided Translation
projects Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), Linguistic Modelling Lab (LML) |
| 2006-present | MUSING EU-funded
Integrated Project on the Next Generation Business
Intelligence I am the Principal Investigator of the Sheffield grant (1,120,614 euros) within the project, which involves 15 other partners. The research is focused on ontology-based Information Extraction, with practical applications in financial risk management, internationalisation, and IT operational risk management. The project will run for 4 years aiming to deliver initial results in the next 18 months to align with Basel II. |
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| 2009-present | TextVRE JISC-funded Project with KCL CeRch, School of Humanities, Sheffield, Gottingen Libraries Co-Investigator of the Sheffield team (budget £24k). Research on a virtual research environment for e-humanities textual studies, providing web-based automatic text annotation services and a virtual research environment to facilitate collaboration and text analysis. |
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| 1998-present | GATE –
General Architecture for Text Engineering, I am involved in the design and development of re-usable, robust language engineering tools, based on commercial technologies – XML, Java,Web services (see gate.ac.uk). I also integrated GATE with an audio-visual architecture in order to support multimedia corpora; was involved in the design and testing of the GATE machine learning facilities; lead the development of the Semantic Web-oriented components; and integrated my language generation modules. I consult colleagues on developing and integrating GATE-based modules for their projects. Future work: Refactoring GATE towards a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and collaborative language engineering facilities. |
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| 2008-2009 | ServiceFinder EU-funded Strategic Targeted Research Project on Web Service Discovery I am the project Principal Investigator of the Sheffield grant (244,000 euros), which involves 4 other partners. Research on text mining and annotation of web services to aid their automatic discovery. |
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| 2006-2009 | TAO EU-funded Strategic Targeted Research Project on Transitioning
Applications to Ontologies I am the project co-ordinator and the Principal Investigator of the Sheffield grant (839,670 euros), which involves 6 other partners. GATE is being used as a case study in this project, which aims to assist the migration of existing ‘legacy’ applications to open, semantics-based service architectures. In addition, customised information extraction tools are being developed, in order to provide semantic-based access to continuously updated content, such as software documentation and code, mailing list postings, database content, and industry standards. |
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| 2004-2006 | SEKT EU-funded Integrated Project on Semantically Enabled Knowledge
Technologies My research focused on integration of Human Language Technology with Knowledge Discovery and ontologies for knowledge management, ontology based Information Extraction for metadata generation, and its evaluation. The techniques are applied in the British Telecom digital library and also for intranet document management in Siemens. | |
| 2001-2004 | MIAKT e-science &
AKT – Advanced Knowledge Technologies projects My research in these projects was oriented towards building robust and customisable tools for knowledge publishing (using natural language generation techniques). The challenging aspects of this work came from the need to generate text from a variety of knowledge sources (e.g., ontologies, information extraction results) none of which were created or specifically adapted for generation. The application was the e-science project MIAKT, where these tools were be deployed as Web services. I was also the technical manager at Sheffield for the MIAKT project. |
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| July-August 2003 | JHU workshop on Semantic Analysis over Sparse Data I was a visiting researcher at Johns Hopkins University for 6 weeks, involved in the development of machine learning-based methods to solving the data sparseness problem that is encountered in many areas of natural language processing such as language modeling, text classification, question answering and information extraction. |
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| 1996-2001 | HYLITE – A system for generation of adaptive hypertext explanations Knowledge-based approach combined with a pragmatics model of agent attitudes Novel aspects: use of a nested model of agent attitudes (ViewGen); use of techniques from human-computer interaction and software engineering to design and evaluate the system; use of a large-scale lexical resource to bootstrap the creation of the system-specific lexicon and knowledge base. |
| 2007 | NLP master-class for 15-18 year old school children. Covered general introduction or NLP, followed by practical, hands-on exercise. Aimed at raising awareness of science and AI in general for young children. |
| 2008 | Transitioning Legacy Applications to Ontologies: A Hands-on Tutorial at European Semantic Web Conferences |
| 2004-2006 | Tutorials on Human Language Technology for Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web at the European Semantic Web Conferences |
| 2003 | Tutorial on Named Entity Recognition at RANLP 2003 |
| September 2007 | Week-long NLP course at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona |
| Sept-Dec 2000 | Part-time Teaching Assistant (incl. 4 lectures) ‘Programming and Problem Solving in Java’ course Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
| 1998–99 | Part-time Teaching Assistant Several Java courses for undergraduate and MSc students (programming, HCI, software engineering) Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
| 1997 | Part-time Teaching Assistant for Modula-2 and C courses Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sheffield |
In 2002 I co-supervised with Dr. Hamish Cunningham an MSc student from Sofia University who completed a very successful final year project, which forms part of the GATE research work. Currently I provide feedback on research papers and research directions for 2 PhD students – one of them working on the SEKT project.
Principal investigator: As a principal investigator on 3 large EU grants, I frequently liase with the university's research office on project accounts, legal and contractual matters, staffing, IPR, and gender equality.
Project coordination: As a coordinator of an EU project I have a number of administrative tasks: periodical reporting to the EC; periodic review of project finances, projected and actual spending and effort; timely delivery of project results to the EC.
NLP Seminar Organiser: Between 2003 and 2005 I was the organiser of the NLP group’s research seminars, which include both invited speakers and NLP project presentations.
Computing Experience
| Programming languages | Java, Prolog, C++, Lisp, Pascal, FoxPro, Oracle, Delphi, Visual Basic |
| Comp Ling Systems | RealPro, Exemplars (commercial language generation tools), WordNet, Amilcare |
| Web-related | CGI, JavaScript, applets, HTML, XML |
| Platforms and Environments | PCs – Windows95/NT – system administrator level Macintosh, Unix – user level |
Y. Li, K. Bontcheva and H. Cunningham. Adapting SVM for Data Sparseness and Imbalance: A Case Study on Information Extraction. Natural Language Engineering, 15(02), 241-271, 2009.