Automatic Text Simplification

Horacio Saggion is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona. He is head of the Large Scale Text Understanding Systems Lab and a member of the Natural Language Processing research group (TALN) where he works on automatic text summarization, text simplification, information extraction, sentiment analysis, and related topics. His research is empirical, combining symbolic, pattern-based approaches, and statistical and machine learning techniques. Horacio is also an active teacher and student supervisor. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Universite de Montreal, Canada. He obtained his B.Sc. in computer science from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and his M.Sc. in computer science from UNICAMP, Brazil. Before joining Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Saggion worked at the University of Sheffield, UK, for almost ten years for a number national and European research projects developing competitive human language technology in the areas of text summarization and question answering. Saggion was also an invited senior researcher at the Center for Language and Speech Processing, John Hopkins University, USA, for a project on multilingual text summarization. He is currently a principal investigator in a number of national and European research projects in text summarization, text simplification, and information extraction. Saggion has published over 100 works in leading scientific journals, conferences, and books in the field of human language technology. He has organized several international workshops in the areas of text summarization and information extraction and was also co-chair of the 2009 Symposium on Information and Human Language Technology (STIL) and chair of the 30th Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN). He is co-editor of the book Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization, Springer, 2013. He is a regular program committee member for international conferences such as ACL, EACL, COLING, EMNLP, IJCNLP, and IJCAI and is an active reviewer for international journals in computer science, information processing, and human language technology. Saggion has given courses, tutorials, and invited talks at a number of international events including COLING, LREC, ESSLLI, IJCNLP, NLDB, and RuSSIR. He has received a number of grants and fellowships throughout his research career from institutions including Fundacion Antorchas, the Argentinian Ministry of Education, the Canadian Agency for International Development, and the Ramon y Cajal Research Program.