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Khalil Sima'an

Associate Professor (UHD) at the Faculty of Exact Sciences (FNWI) and the Deputy Programme Leader Language and Computation, ILLC, UvA.

The SLLP Lab. focuses on statistical modeling for natural language processing, including tasks such as Parsing, Machine Translation, Morphological Processing, POS Tagging and spoken language understanding. Our work spans the aspects of Statistical Modeling, Estimation/Learning, Algorithms and Computational Complexity.

Degrees

1987 Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Technion, Haifa.
1992 M.Sc. in Computer Science, UvA, Amsterdam (Supervisor: Paul Klint, UvA).
1999 Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, Utrecht University, Utrecht (Promotores: Jan Landsbergen and Remko Scha).

Overview work history

1987-89	Haifa Orthodox Arab College	Teacher of Math and CS subjects.
1987-88	Arabic Language Educational Software Initiative	Co-founder (together with Johny Sroujy).
1989	[ ---- Moved to Amsterdam -----]	[--- Learned the Dutch language ---]
1990-92	University of Amsterdam	Teaching Assistant in Dept of Informatics
1993	Delft University of Technology	Research Assistant (Temporal Logics and Process Algebras as specification languages for real-time systems).
1994-97	UiL-OTS Utrecht University	Researcher (European Project CLASK -- Combining Linguistics with Statistical Knowledge).
1998-99	UiL-OTS Utrecht University	Wrote and defended a Ph.D. Thesis Learning Efficient Disambiguation
1999-2000	ILK, Tilburg University	Postdoc researcher (Probabilistic Memory-Based Model of Language Processing)
2001- 02	University of Amsterdam	Royal Academy (KNAW) Fellow
2003-2010	University of Amsterdam	Assistant Professor at ILLC.
2006-2011	University of Amsterdam	VIDI laureate of NWO Exact Sciences.
2006-Now	University of Amsterdam	Deputy Leader of the Section Language and Computation.
2011-Now	University of Amsterdam	Associate Professor at ILLC.

Prizes and awards

2000 Outstanding dissertation award European Foundation for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) for Learning Efficient Disambiguation (ILLC dissertation series 1999-02).
2000 Best paper award, BNAIC 2000
2002 KNAW Fellow (Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences): A competitive national scheme that predated the Vernieuwingsimpuls of NWO
2004 Open Competition of NWO Exact Sciences Board, project proposal: Learning Stochastic Tree Grammars from Treebanks
2006 VIDI laureate of NWO Exact Sciences Board: Priors for the Estimation of Stochastic Grammars from Incomplete Natural Language Data
2007 Best paper award, BNAIC 2007 (together with M. Mylonakis)
2010 Free Competition of NWO Exact Sciences Board, project proposal: Machine Translation When Exact Pattern Match Fails.
2012 Free Competition of NWO Exact Sciences Board, project proposal: Statistical Translation of Novel Constructions

Area Chair, Advisory Boards, Editorial Boards

2011 Member of the Editorial Board of Machine Translation journal
2011 Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE).
2011 Advisory Board Member for John Benjamins Publishers' book series on Natural Language Processing
2011 Member of the Editorial Board of the CLIN Journal http://www.clinjournal.org/
2010 ACL 2010 Area Chair (jointly with Yusuke Miyao) for the "Syntax, parsing, grammar induction, grammar engineering".

Ongoing and Some Past Professional Activities (Invited Talks, PC membership, Supervision etc).

Publications

Various research results, in collaboration with others, are available in the form of downloadable software packages or data files.