Organising Committee for TC45

Denis Dechandon
Coordinator for TC45

AsLing Treasurer

Denis Dechandon is an experienced tool and business manager with a demonstrated history of working in in the government administration industry. His studies and professional activities focus on multilingualism, linguistics, translation, natural language processing and foreign languages, as well as semantic technologies, interoperability, knowledge organisation system creation and maintenance, and process automation. Enhancing the semantic interoperability, enlarging the use of semantic technologies and supporting government administrations and national public services for creating, maintaining, enhancing and disseminating semantic assets and tools are at the very heart of the activities he is currently involved in, the ultimate purpose being to increase data flows, the sharing reuse of data, as well as to promote further developments in the field of Linguistic Linked Open Data.

Denis was elected to the Executive Committee of AsLing in November 2022 and subsequently elected by the Executive Committee to be AsLing Treasurer. He has also taken it upon himself to serve as overall Coordinator for TC45, AsLing’s tenth TC conference.

Maria Recort Ruiz
Sponsorship Coordinator for TC45
 
AsLing President

Maria Recort Ruiz is a philologist, translator and terminologist who works as Document Services Coordinator and Terminology Manager at the International Labour Organization in Geneva. She is responsible for the production and management of official documents, management of terminology work and the use of new CATT tools to improve working methods.

She holds a Degree in Slavic Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she specialized in Russian and Polish Language and Literature, and Linguistics; a Master in French and Comparative Literature (19th-20th centuries) from the University of Montpellier, where she conducted research on the roman populaire at the beginning of the 20th century; and a Master in Specialized Translation from the University of Geneva.

Before joining the ILO, Maria worked as a freelance translator and editor for international organizations and the private sector.

After several years attending Translating and the Computer conferences and after giving several presentations in past years, María started her career within the Organising Committee as Deputy Coordinator for TC42 in 2020.  For TC43 in 2021 she joined Olaf-Michael Stefanov as Co-coordinator. For TC44 she was the Coordinator, assisted by then AsLing President, João Esteves-Ferreira. 

In November 2022 Maria was elected to become AsLing’s second President, succeeding João Esteves Ferreira who served as AsLing’s first President from 2014 through the end of 2022.

Ruslan Mitkov AsLing Vice President Ruslan Mitkov (Prof Dr) has been working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and related areas since the early 1980s. His research output was highlighted as being internationally leading in the last UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008). 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 210 publications including 9 books, 25 journal articles and 25 book chapters) also covers topics such as machine translation, natural language generation, automatic summarisation, computer-aided language processing, centring, translation memory, evaluation, corpus annotation, bilingual term extraction, automatic identification of cognates and false friends, NLP-driven corpus-based study of translation universals and text simplification. 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. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (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. He is also working on the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Computational Linguistics (co-authored with Patrick Hanks) and the forthcoming second, substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.
Prof Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences. He has acted as Programme Chair of various 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. Dr Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit (more than £ 15,000,000) 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. 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. Dr Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences 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 (the output of the Research Group was classed by RAE 2008 as internationally leading, internationally excellent and internationally recognised) and members of the group have won awards in different NLP/shared-task competitions. 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. The Research Institute consists of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics and the Research Group in Statistical Cybermetrics, which is another top performer in the recent RAE. Ruslan Mitkov is Vice President of AsLing an international Association for promoting Language Technology. In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof Mitkov was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in November 2011. In November 2014 Dr Mitkov was conferred the title Profesor Honoris Causa at Veliko Tarnovo University.

Vilelmini Sosoni
Publications Coordinator

AsLing Secretary

Vilelmini Sosoni is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University in Greece. She has taught Specialised Translation in the United Kingdom at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Roehampton University, and in Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Metropolitan College and the Institut Français d’Athènes.

She also has extensive professional experience having worked as a professional translator, editor and subtitler.

She studied English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds an MA in Translation and a PhD in Translation and Text Linguistics from the University of Surrey. Her research interests lie in the areas of the Translation of Institutional and Political Texts, Corpus Linguistics, Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility, as well as Machine Translation and Cognitive Science.

She is, among others, a founding member of the Laboratory “Language and Politics” of the Ionian University and the Greek Chapter of Women in Localization and a member of the “Research Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies” of the University of Roehampton.

She is also a member of the Advisory Board and the Management Board of the European Master’s in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM TTI) funded by Erasmus+.

She has participated in several EU-funded projects, notably Resonant, Trumpet, TraMOOC, Eurolect Observatory and Training Action for Legal Practitioners: Linguistic Skills and Translation in EU Competition Law, while she has edited several volumes and books on translation and published numerous articles in international journals and collective volumes.

Having joined the Organising Committee in early 2022 she took on the role of co-coordinator for the Proceedings of TC44. Vilelmini was elected to the Executive Committee of AsLing in November 2022 and subsequently elected by the Executive Committee to be AsLing Secretary.

 
 

Olaf-Michael Stefanov

AsLing Vice President

Olaf-Michael Stefanov is an IT professional with a strong focus on multilingualism. During 36 years on staff at the United Nations he managed various information-technology related areas, the last being Library and Linguistic Support for Vienna headquarters, which included reference and terminology support for the editorial, translation and interpretation sections.

Having introduced the first completely web-based multilingual terminology database handling Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Latin scripts for input, query, and output, VINTARS, he presented it at the 20th Translating and the Computer in 1998. He also introduced digital dictation and voice-recognition into the translation workflow of several international and multinational organizations.

Although retired from the UN he continues to serve in the site administration and management of JIAMCATT, an information exchange among governmental and intergovernmental language professionals, served as co-moderator of the JIAMCATT Working Group on Standards and Interoperability and implemented multilingual Web 2.0 and CMS tools for JIAMCATT.

He is also active in Tiki, a leading open source CMS, Wiki and Groupware tool and was active in drafting the ITS 2.0 (Internationalization Tag Set) standard under the aegis of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2013.

He has been a member of the Programme Committee of FEISGILTT since 2012.

He is co-founder, Vice President and coordinateur of AsLing, the International Association for Language Technology which took over the Translating and the Computer conference series from ASLIB in 2014.

Having served as co-chair of conferences in this series from 2000 he served as lead chair in 2013. For TC37, 2015, the second conference in this series run by AsLing, he was conference coordinator, a role he had again for TC40, 2018, and once again for TC43, 2021.

He joined María Recort Ruiz as Co-coordinator for AsLing’s second virtual conference, TC43, which took place online in the week of 15 November 2021. For TC45, Olaf-Michael continues to serve on the conference Organising Committee, as he has done every year for the 10 years since AsLing took over the series.

Based in Vienna, Olaf-Michael is actively engaged worldwide in a variety of multilingual projects and conferences.

Vicent Briva-Iglesias

Vicent Briva-Iglesias holds a BA (Hons) in Translation and Interpreting from the Universitat Jaume I (Spain), as well as an MSc (Hons) in Translation Technologies from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). Currently, he is pursuing a PhD on MT and HCI at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) at Dublin City University, and he is funded by the SFI Research Centre for Digitally-Enhanced Reality (D-REAL; www.d-real.ie).

Regarding academic experience, Vicent lectures the “Professional Orientation for Translators” and “Introduction to Python Programming for Linguists” modules at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in the Master’s Degree of Translation and Technologies.

He has also presented his research in different international conferences (e.g., AMTA, IATIS, NeTTT, Translating and the Computer) and has some publications in conference proceedings (NAACL) and journals (Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, Tradumàtica or Mutatis Mutandis) in the MT, Translation Studies or NLP fields.

Vicent’s interest in the academic aspects of translation is heavily influenced, and, in a way, enhanced, by his professional approach and practice of translation. He runs AWORDZ LTD, a small language service provider, and has worked as a professional language engineer for 5+ years. In addition, he is an English, Spanish, Catalan, and Valencian certified sworn translator, appointed by the Government of Catalonia.

Vicent joins the AsLing Organising Committee to help organise TC45, 2023, in Luxembourg 20-22 November.

Emmanuelle_Esperança-Rodier

Emmanuelle Esperança-Rodier is an Associate Professor at the University of Grenoble Alps (UGA), France. She teaches English for Specific and Academic Purposes at the Service des Langues UGA, and Machine Translation Evaluation at the Linguistics Dpt, the Computer Science Dpt and PolyTech (French Engineering School).

She is studying Skill-Based and Task-Centered Machine Translation Evaluation, Translation Error Analysis, and Alternative and Augmented Communication at the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (LIG).

Emmanuelle participated in IWSLT and WMT evaluation campaigns, as well as in several LIG projects on Neural Machine Translation.

After studying technical writing and translation, Emmanuelle graduated with a PhD in computational linguistics on the quality of writing in Simplified English (AECMA). Before joining the UGA, she worked as a project manager and translator in a technical translation agency for several years.

She is a member of the SAES  (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), as well as of the research group GdR LIFT (Computational, Formal and Field Linguistics) and a member of the Human Language Technologies (TLH) steering committee of the French Association for Artificial Intelligence (AfIA).

Having given presentations at Translating and the Computer conferences since TC38 in 2016, Emmanuelle now joins the Organising Committee.

Valentini Kalfadopoulou

Valentini is a PhD Candidate in Ionian’s University’s Department of Foreign Languages, Translation & Interpreting. She currently serves as a board member on the board of the Panhellenic Association of Translators (PEM), driving the Continued Professional Development (CPD) initiative as well as the Localization and Terminology workgroups. Additionally, she is currently serving as a member on the editorial board of the FIT Mundus Translatio Journal, and as a member in the Scientific Committee of the Greek Network for Terminology (EDO).

Lastly, she is a member of the ELOT TE21 Standards Committee on Language Services and Resources and ASTM’s Holistic Quality Assurance workgroup.

She is a top honor graduate of the MSc Technoglossia programme, a computational linguistics and language technology Master’s degree from Athens University, the Athens Polytechnic, the Institute of Language and Speech Processing, and the Demokritos Research Center. She holds a BA with a major in Philosophy from Athens University’s Philosophy – Psychology and Pedagogics department.

Since 1997 she has been working as a freelance language specialist for projects involving translation, editing, proofing, language quality and terminology extraction.

In 2004 she joined Oracle, namely the International Product Solutions department, as a Senior Language Specialist for the Greek language. Her corporate role also includes being part of the English terminology team as well as the Customer Feedback team, gathering language quality, usability and user experience data for all Oracle’s translated products.

Valentini joins the AsLing Organising Committee to help organise TC45, 2023, in Luxembourg 20-22 November.

The Executive Committee of AsLing may be announcing additional members of the Coordinating Committee for TC45.

Last updated: 17 May 2023