Hristo (Christo) Tanev Tanev

Born on 22 April 1973 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Marital status: married with two children

Languages: Bulgarian, English, Italian, understanding Russian

Qualifications:

• PostDoc project - Multilingual Question Answering on the Web, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
• PhD in Computer Science (thesis: Automatic Text Analysis and Ambiguities Resolution in Bulgarian),
  University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria
• Magister degree in Mathematics, Specialization: Computer Science,
  University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Full time positions:

• 2006 - current NLP researcher at JRC. Main activities: carrying out research and building software for text mining and event extraction.
• 2003 - 2005 working on a PostDoc project MoreWeb - Multilingual Question Answering on the Web. Main activities: development of a multilingual Question Answering system on the Web.
• 2001 - 2003 Consultant in Communication and Cognitive Technologies division (TCC), Irst, Istituto Trentino di Cultura, Trento, Italy. Main activities: developing of a system for Open Domain Question Answering.
• 1998 - 2001 Full time teaching assistant in Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Main activities: conducting seminars in computer science, implementation of tools for automatic analysis of Bulgarian texts.

Research interests:

• Text Mining
• Information Extraction - event and relation extraction
• Lexical acquisition and Machine Learning  
• Ontology Population
• Structural pattern learning and efficient pattern matching
• Grammars for text analysis

Programming languages:

• Mastering C++, Java, Perl, LISP, SQL
• Good knowledge of Object Pascal
• Average knowledge of  HTML, JavaScript, CSS

Operating Systems : Windows 32, UNIX, Linux

Education:

• 2000-2001 PhD in computer science. University of Plovdiv 'Paisii Hilendarski'
  Title of PhD thesis: 'Automatic Text Analysis and Ambiguities Resolution in Bulgarian'
  Tutor: Georgi Totkov
• 1991-1996 Higher education: University of Plovdiv 'Paisii Hilendarski'
  Qualification: Magister equivallent degree in Mathematics with Specialization Computer Science.
  Computer related subjects studied : Informatics I,II , Discrete mathematics, Programming methods, Programming languages, Numerical methods I, II, Artificial intelligence I, II, Object-oriented programming, Algorithms and data structures, Computer Architecture, Operating systems, Computer graphics, Data bases and information systems, Software production organisation and technology, Probabilities and statistics, Computer languages compared
  Diploma paper: 'A system designed for automatic construction of a language- independent morphological processor '
  Tutor: Hristo Krushkov
  Diploma paper mark: EXCELLENT 6.0 (maximum 6.0)
  Average result of the exams during the course of study and diploma paper: EXCELLENT 5,53 (maximum 6.0)
• 1987-1991 Secondary education: Mathematical School 'Academik Kiril Popov', Plovdiv, Bulgaria
  Profile: Mathematics and English language /English - 830 hours/
  Qualification : Computer Programmer
  Average results of the exams taken: EXCELLENT 6.00 (maximum 6.0)

Training courses attended:

• Advanced English and Italian language courses
• Software design and design patterns courses
• Java courses

Projects, programs created:

• 2006-2008 Event Extraction system NEXUS, used for global crisis monitoring. Working programming languages:  Java, Perl, C++
• 2006-2008 Relation Extraction for social networks - SocioExplorer.  Working  programming language: C++, Perl
• 2003 Project MoreWeb. Adapting Question Answering system for the Italian language. Development of a Bulgarian Question Answering prototype. Working programming language: LISP, Object Pascal
• 2001 Active participation in TEXTEC (Istituto Trentino di Cultura, Italy). Development of software system for Question Answering. Working programming language: LISP. 
• 1998 - 2000 Collaborative project with University of Wolverhampton A software system for language processing of Bulgarian LINGUA is created. It has an automatic pronoun resolution component, automatic syntactic analysis and semantic information; different scientific experiments are carried out with this system. The software in this project is created exclusively by Hristo Tanev with the financial support of University of Wolverhampton. Working programming language: Object Pascal in Delphi environment. 
• 2000 April A sentence-splitting program is created and sold to the University of Wolverhampton. The system was used for processing Wolverhampton Business English Corpus. 'The Sentence Splitter' implemented a complex multilingual algorithm for splitting a text into sentences.

Awards received:

• 1995 Third place in the literature contest organized by 'Plovdiv University' paper.
• 1991 National programming competition - score gained to be accepted without entrance exams in the university
• 1990 First place in the theoretical conference, organized from the Union of the Mathematicians in Bulgaria - pre-compiler for the Learning Language INFO
• 1991 Golden badge from the Mathematical School
• 1986,87 First places in a district competition in Mathematics

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