Horacio Saggion PhD., MSc., Lic. in Computer Science

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I am a Ramon y Cajal Research Professor in the TALN Group at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

My main research interest is Computational Linguistics. I work in the areas of Text Summarization, Information Extraction and Semantic Analysis.

I have over 12 years research and development experience with the GATE platform.

I am the creator of the SUMMA Summarization system.

 

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Recent Activities

• Best Paper Award to Simplify or Help? Text Simplification Strategies for People with Dyslexia. Luz Rello, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion
• Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Natural Language Processing in the Journal Informatics.
• Poibeau, T.; Saggion, H.; Piskorski, J.; Yangarber, R. (Eds.) Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization in Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer. 2013. Find it at Amazon.
• Organizing the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation at ACL 2013.
• Organizing the 2nd Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA) at NAACL 2013.
• Summarization Track Chair at COLING 2012.
• The Simplext Project awarded Vodafone Innovation Award.

Recent Projects

• 2013-2015. Scenario Knowledge Acquisition by Textual Reading: Knowledge-based Concise Summarization (TIN2012-38584-C06-03). Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain. UPF Principal Investigator.
• 2010-2013. Simplext: A Text Simplification System for Spanish (TSI-020302-2010-84). Plan Avanza 2. Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Trade. Spain. UPF Principal Investigator and Project Scientific Coordinator.
• 2011-2012. Automatic Summarization Tools for Easy Access to Textual Information. (Ref. 47 PLAQUID 2010-2011 1), Pompeu Fabra University, Centre for Teaching Quality and Innovation. Principal Investigator.
• 2010-2015. Methods and Tools for Abstractive Text Summarization. Ramón y Cajal Advanced Research Fellowship (RYC-2009-04291). Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain. Individual Grant.
• 2009-2011. Natural Language Processing for Discourse Analysis in Psychology. Royal Society, United Kingdom. Principal Investigator.

Recent Publications (Saggion's Publication List)

• Frequent Words Improve Readability and Short Words Improve Comprehension for People with Dyslexia. Rello, L. and Baeza-Yates, R. and Saggion, H. and Dempere-Marco, L. Accepted in INTERACT 2013, Cape-Town, SA, 2-6 September, 2013.
• One Half or 50%? An Eye-Tracking Study of Number Representation Readability. Rello, L. and Bautista, S. and Hervás, R. and Baeza-Yates, R. and Saggion, H. and Gervás, P. Accepted in INTERACT 2013, Cape-Town, SA, 2-6 September, 2013.
• Unsupervised Learning Summarization Templates from Concise Summaries. Saggion, H. Accepted for the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. June 10 - 12, 2013
• Automatic Text Simplication in Spanish: A Comparative Evaluation of Complementing Components. Drndarevic, B. and Stajner, S. and Bott, S. and Bautista, S. and Saggion, H. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Samos, Greece, 24-30 March. 2013.
• Can Spanish Be Simpler? LexSiS: Lexical Simplification for Spanish. Bott, S. and Rello, L. and Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Mumbai, India, 8-15 December. 2012.
• Reducing Text Complexity through Automatic Lexical Simplification: an Empirical Study for Spanish. Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H. Journal of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing. 49. pp13-20. 2012.
• Unsupervised Content Discovery from Concise Summaries NAACL Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX 2012). 2012.