Profile
Ruslan Mitkov is a Distinguished Professor in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the University of Alicante. His research spans several areas of Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Translation Technology.
Professor Mitkov completed his PhD at the Technical University of Dresden under the supervision of Nikolaus Joachim Lehmann, and prior to that graduated from Humboldt University of Berlin. Before joining the University of Alicante, he worked at Lancaster University, one of the top ten universities in the United Kingdom. Earlier in his career, he was at the University of Wolverhampton, where he founded and led the internationally leading Research Group in Computational Linguistics. During his time there, he also served as Director of the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing and as Director of the Responsible Digital Humanities Lab.
Recent Events and Keynotes
- February 2025: Invited talk, Manchester Metropolitan University (Manchester, UK).
- April 2025: Invited talk, Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria).
- May 2025: Keynote, First International Conference on Research Methods and Practices in Translation, Interpreting and AI (Algiers, Algeria).
- June 2025: Keynote, 6th International Conference GranasSlavic 2025 (Granada, Spain).
- September 2025: Keynote, CASE 2025 workshop (Varna, Bulgaria).
- November 2025: Keynote, Professional Translation and Language Services in the AI Era (Hong Kong).
- November 2025: Keynote, "A Philology for the 21st Century" (Santiago de Compostela, Spain).
- Early 2026: Keynote and invited talks in Dammam, Saudi Arabia (Intelligent Planet Hackathon and KFUPM).
- LaTeLL 2026 (Fes, Morocco, 30 Sep - 2 Oct 2026): Conference Chair. Official site.
- NLPAICS 2026 (Alicante, Spain, 11-12 Jun 2026): Conference Chair. Committees.
- International Summer School 2026 (Alicante, Spain, 15-17 Jun 2026): Summer School Chair. Organisation.
- NeTTIT 2026 (Dubrovnik, Croatia, 24-27 Jun 2026): Conference Chair. Official site.
Selected Recent Papers
- 2025: Ranasinghe et al. Sinhala Encoder-only Language Models and Evaluation, ACL 2025.
- 2025: Anuradha, Ha, Mitkov. HoloBERT: Pre-Trained Transformer Model for Historical Narratives, RANLP 2025.
- 2025: Jones, Mitkov. Evaluating the Performance of Transformers in Translating Low-Resource Languages through Akkadian, R2LM 2025.
- 2025: Boyd, Mitkov. Machine Translation in the AI Era, CASE 2025.
- 2025: Hettiarachchi et al. Overview of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2025), COLING workshop proceedings.
- 2024: Mitkov, Ha. Are rule-based approaches a thing of the past? The case of anaphora resolution, Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 72.
- 2024: Lincheros, Corpas Pastor, Mitkov. Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition in the Biomedical Domain, Language Resources and Evaluation.
Recent Successfully Completed PhD Supervisions
- Linguistic features of translations as a quality metric for human and automatic translation, Maria Kunilovskaya, 2023
- Wikipedia-based approaches to multilingual information extraction, Alistair Plum, 2022
- Traduccion asistida por ordenador: analisis contrastivo de las coincidencias parciales fuzzy matches en los pares de lenguas espanol-frances, frances-espanol y arabe-espanol mediante transformaciones semantico-sintacticas, Souhila Djabri, 2022
- Deep learning based Semantic Textual Similarity for Applications in Translation Technology, Tharindu D. Ranasinghe Hettiarachchige, 2021
- Parameterized monads in linguistics, Viet Ha Bui, 2021
- Contributions to computational treatment of non-literal language, Omid Rohanian, 2020
- Gender Variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic, Najah Albaqawi, 2020
- Sentence Simplification for Text Processing, Richard Evans, 2020
- Collection and Preparation of Multilingual Data for Multiple Corpus-based Approaches to Translations, Hernani Costa, 2019
- Building relevance judgments list for a test collection without using human intervention, Mireille Makary, 2019
- Automatic identification and translation of Multiword Expressions, Shiva Taslimipoor, 2018
- AUTOR: Assessing Text and Web Accessibility for People with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Victoria Yaneva, 2016
- Use of Language Technology to Improve Matching and Retrieval in Translation Memory, Rohit Gupta, 2016
- New data-driven approaches to text simplification, Sanja Stajner, 2015
- Measuring semantic similarity of texts, Miguel Angel Rios Gaona, 2014
- Modelling and using context knowledge for statistical machine translation, Wilker Aziz, 2014
- Question generation from video documents, Yvonne Skalban, 2013
- A study on plagiarism detection and plagiarism direction identification using natural language processing techniques, Miranda Chong, 2013
- Knowledge acquisition from Wikipedia for interactive QA, Natalia Konstantinova, 2013
- A Machine Learning Approach to the Identification of Translational Language: An Inquiry into Translationese Learning Models, Iustina-Narcisa Ilisei, 2013
- Collaborative encyclopaedias for question answering, Iustin Dornescu, 2012
- NLP approaches to text simplification, Irina Temnikova, 2012
- Unsupervised relation extraction for e-learning applications, Naveed Afzal, 2011
- Temporal processing of news and its impact on question answering, Georgiana Puscasu, 2011
- Advances in Automatic Terminology Processing: Methodology and application in focus, Le An Ha, 2007
- From extracts to abstracts: Human summary production operations for computer-aided summarization, Laura Hasler, 2007
- Comparative evaluation of modular automatic summarisation systems using CAST, Constantin Orasan, 2006
- Resolucion automatica de anafora indirecta en el espanol, Raul Morales Carrasco, 2004
- Bilingual Pronoun Resolution: Experiments in English and French, Catalina Barbu, 2003
Research, Funding and Impact Highlights
- More than 330 publications, including books, journal articles, and book chapters.
- Director of Studies for 30 successfully completed PhD students; currently supervising 7 PhD students (CV, Nov 2024).
- Supervisor of more than 40 successfully completed MPhil/Master-level dissertations.
- Principal Investigator of major funded projects including EM TTI (EC Erasmus Mundus), EXPERT (FP7 Marie Curie ITN), FIRST (FP7), and long-term NBME collaborations.
- Key distinctions include Doctor Honoris Causa (Plovdiv University, 2011), Professor Honoris Causa (Veliko Tarnovo University, 2014), and Doctor Honoris Causa (New Bulgarian University, 2022).