CURRICULUM VITAE

Constandinos S. Kalimeris

AT H EN S, No v e mb er 2 0 0 8

CURRICULUM VITAE Constandinos S. Kalimeris

Table of Contents

C. Kalimeris CV, November 2008

Page

Personal Data

3

Education

3

Languages

4

Research Activities

4

Dissertations

6

Papers (Published)

6

Papers (Submitted)

6

Papers (in Preparation)

7

Participation in Research Training Courses and Tutorials

7

Software

8

Programming

8

Teaching Experience

8

Translation Experience

9

Membership in Professional Organisations

9

Honours and Awards

9

State Licences and Recognitions

10

Interests, Other Activities

10

Appendix: List of Academic Subjects

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Constandinos S. Kalimeris Computational Linguist, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP). BA in English Language with Linguistics (University of Sheffield). MSc in Human Language Technologies (UoA, NTUA).

Personal Data Place of Birth:

Athens

Date of Birth:

10 February 1970

Nationality:

Greek

Marital Status:

Single

Home Address:

Rodopis 41, Vrilissia, 152 35, Athens, Greece

Telephones:

ILSP: personal:

E-mail:

[email protected]

Homepage:

http://www.ilsp.gr/homepages/kalimeris_eng.html

+30 210 6875413 (office), 6875300 (call centre), 6854270 (fax) +30 210 6844285 (voice mail & fax), +30 693 8735564 (mobile) (ILSP), [email protected] (personal)

Education 2001 - 2004

MSc in Human Language Technologies, “TECHNOGLOSSIA”. Organisers and Participant Institutions:

• • •

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA), School of Philosophy, Department of Linguistics, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Division of Signals, Control and Robotics, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP).

Grade: Class One Honours (8.85). Master’s Thesis: “A study for the extraction of phonological information from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC), with a view to producing Minimal Pairs and computing Functional Loads for Modern Greek”, in Greek (Grade: 10).

1997 - 2000

University of Sheffield, Department of English Language and Linguistics. BA in English Language with Linguistics. Grade: Class One Honours (8.95).

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Languages • Greek (native speaker) • English (near-native) BA in English Language with Linguistics, Sheffield, Class One Honours. Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE), Cambridge, Grade A (1989).

• French (elements of)

Research Activities 2004 – 2008

Researcher (under scholarship) in the Voice and Sound Technology Department of the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP). (Nov. 2004 – Oct. 2008) Collaborations with the Department of Education Technology of ILSP as a Phonetic Transcriptions editor in a number of Research and Development Projects. Below follows a summary of the research work he has conducted in different research areas while at ILSP: SUMMARY OF RESEARCH WORK

Computational Morphology • Semi-automatic extraction of morph-like character strings from long lists of words represented in orthographic and phonetic script. • Semi-supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for the automatic segmentation of orthographic words into morphs. Design and development of the first experimental version of the software MORPHEMIA. See “Papers” (1), (4).

Language Modeling • Language modeling using Units smaller or larger than the conventional Word (multiphone and multigraph units, clusters of alphabetic and control characters, morphs, syllables). Potential for utilization of the postulated nonconventional units in Computational Morphology and Lexicography, in Office Automation Applications (e.g. spell-checkers) and in Voice Technologies. See “Papers” (5); also (1), (4).

Automatic Pseudo-Word and Pseudo-Text Generation • Algorithms for the automatic generation of phonologically natural (phonotactically well-formed) pseudo-words. Potential for the utilization of the generated material in experiments measuring the perceptual and productive performance of human subjects and the performance of Language Technology applications. See “Papers” (5). • Algorithms for the automatic generation of phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and textually natural (well-formed) pseudo-text. Potential for the utilization of the generated material in Cryptography and in experiments measuring the perceptual and productive performance of human subjects and the performance of Language Technology applications.

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Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) • Methodologies for the maximal exploitation of the natural prosodic characteristics of acoustic units. • Acoustic Units database design utilising phoneme patterns extracted semiautomatically from large electronic text corpora. • Algorithms for the segmentation of the phonetic representations of natural written texts into quasi-syllabic and quasi-word segments. • Semi-automatic segmentation of recorded digital signals of natural speech into acoustic units using the software Praat. • Assimilation and deletion phenomena occurring across word boundaries and their replication in text-to-speech synthesis. Emphasis on phonological processes involving word-final /n/’s and word-final /s/’s. See “Papers” (3). • Problems related to the synthesis of the strings and . See “Dissertations”. • Automatic transcription of orthographic representations into phonetic script (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion) for Modern Greek. Emphasis on the resolution of the phonetic ambiguity of /CiV/ phoneme clusters. See “Dissertations”. • Grapheme-to-phoneme rules for Bulgarian. Participation in the Research Programme “INTERREG IIIA / PHARE CBC Greece – Bulgaria”, Project: “Transference and Adaptation of Technology for the Production of Synthetic Voice from Texts for the Bulgarian Language and its Utilisation in Tools of Cultural Promotion with Emphasis on Physically Challenged Persons (AMEA)”.

Electronic Text Corpora Processing • Semi-automatic extraction of phoneme patterns from large electronic text corpora, utilised in the design of Acoustic Units databases. • Extraction of phonological information from large electronic corpora of written language and experimentation with random representative samples extracted from them. See “Dissertations”.

Phonetics and Phonology • Minimal Pairs and the Functional Loads of phonological contrasts computed from linguistic data extracted from long wordlists deriving form large electronic text corpora. See “Dissertations” and “Papers” (2), (6). • Minimally and Maximally Arbitrary sound contrasts and their distributions across the lexicon of Modern Greek. See “Papers” (6). • The allophones of /i/ and the phonetic ambiguity of /CiV/ phoneme clusters. See “Dissertations”. • Assimilation and deletion phenomena occurring across word boundaries. Emphasis on phonological processes involving word-final /n/’s and wordfinal /s/’s. See “Papers” (3). • Editing of the phonetic (allophonic) transcriptions of the lemmas in the Glossary of the Multimedia Series “Filoglossia+” (Learning Greek as a Foreign Language) of ILSP. • Editing of phonetic (allophonic) transcriptions during the digitization of the lexicographical citation cards of the Research Centre of Modern Greek Dialects and Idioms (ΙΛΝΕ) of the Academy of Athens. Participation in the Research Programme “Information Society”, Project: “Monuments of

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Modern Greek Speech”. (Project Implementation: ΙΛΝΕ, Contractor: ILSP.) 2000 - 2001

University of Sheffield, Department of English Language and Linguistics. Participation in the Postgraduate Research Project “The Study of Sound Change, 1870 – 1970”, under scholarship provided by the University. Fields of Research: Diachronic Phonology, Theory of Language Change, History of Linguistics. Scientific Supervisors: Prof. April M. S. McMahon (at the time Head of Department and President of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain), Prof. Andrew R. Linn (currently Head of Department).

Dissertations 2004

Kalimeris, C., “A study for the extraction of phonological information from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC), with a view to producing Minimal Pairs and computing Functional Loads for Modern Greek”, MSc dissertation, University of Athens and National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, 2004, in Greek. [http://www.ilsp.gr/homepages/kalimeris_eng.html]

Papers (Published) 2008

(1) Kalimeris, C. and Bakamidis, S., “MORPHEMIA: A Semi-supervised Algorithm for the Segmentation of Modern Greek Words into Morphemes”. Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics 2008, ExLing2008, August 25-27, 2008, Athens, Greece, pp. 109112. [http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/]

2007

(2) Kalimeris, C. and Bakamidis, S., “Minimal Pairs and Functional Loads of Sound Contrasts Obtained from a List of Modern Greek Words”. Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech2007, August 27-31, 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, ISSN 1990-9772, pp. 998-1001. [http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/]

2005

(3) Kalimeris, C., Mikros, G. and Bakamidis, S., “Assimilation and Deletion Phenomena Involving Word-Final /n/ and Word-Initial /p, t, k/ in Modern Greek: a Codification of the Observed Variation Intended for Use in TTS Synthesis”. Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Interspeech2005 – Eurospeech, September 4-8, 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, ISSN 1018-4074, pp. 2941-2944. [http://www.iscaspeech.org/archive/]

Papers (Submitted) 2008

C. Kalimeris CV, November 2008

(4) Kalimeris, C. and Bakamidis, S., “A Learning Algorithm for the Morphological Decomposition of Word Forms of Synthetic Languages: Experiments with Data from Modern Greek”, manuscript submitted to IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP), Special Issue on Processing Morphologically Rich Languages. Submission date: 31/07/2008.

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Papers (in Preparation) 2008

(5) Kalimeris, C. et al., “A Probabilistic Data-Driven Pseudo-Word Generator Designed for Languages Using Alphabetical Scripts”, paper in preparation, to be submitted to the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech2009, Brighton, UK.

2008

(6) Kalimeris, C. et al., “Functional Loads of Maximally and Minimally Arbitrary Sound Contrasts in the Lexicon of Modern Greek”, paper in preparation, to be submitted to the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech2009, Brighton, UK.

Participation in Research Training Courses and Tutorials 2007

“Processing Morphologically Rich Languages” Tutorial on the utilisation of morphological information in building language technologies for Morphologically Rich Languages (MLRs). Addressed Issues: Morphological typology • Morphological segmentation • Supervised and Unsupervised Algorithms • MRLs and Automatic Speech Recognition • Language Modeling for MRLs: Morph-based Subword modelling – Joint Lexical-Morphological modeling • MRLs and Machine Translation. Instructors: Katrin Kirchhoff (University of Washington), Ruhi Sarikaya (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center). 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech2007, August 27-31, 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.

2007

“Machine Learning for Text and Speech Processing” Tutorial on the utilisation of Machine Learning Algorithms in building language technologies, with emphasis on Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. Addressed Issues: Text Pre-processing • Word Stress • Grapheme-toPhoneme • Prosody • Disambiguation of Homophones (ASR) and Homographs (TTS): PoS, Surface Syntax, pseudo-Semantics • Modeling Pronunciation Variation • Morphological Analysis • Lemmatization • Syllabification • Hyphenation. Instructors: Antal van den Bosch (ILK, Tilburg University), Walter Daelemans (CNTS, University of Antwerp). 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech2007, August 27-31, 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.

2005

“Building Synthetic Voices” Tutorial reviewing the basic techniques for building synthetic voices. Addressed Issues: Text Analysis • Defining Phone Sets • Letter-to-Sound Rules • Prosodic Modelling (Phrasing, Intonation, Duration) • Waveform Synthesis (Unit Selection, Concatenation, HMM-based Generation, Voice Transformation) • Signal Databases • Recording and Labelling Data • Systems Evaluation.

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Instructor: Alan W. Black (Carnegie Melon University). 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Interspeech2005 – Eurospeech, September 4-8 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. 2000

“Research Methods in Linguistics” (including an Introduction to Probability Theory and Statistics). University of Sheffield, Graduate Research Office, Research Training Programme.

Software • Operating Systems Microsoft Windows 9x/2000/XP • Office Automation Applications Microsoft Office (Excel, Access, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook) • Web Access Software / Internet Browsers MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator • Web Page Development Software Netscape Composer • Special Applications Software Praat, TextPad, WordSmith Tools, MonoConc Pro, Marker, Ellogon, Win2020

Programming • Skilled in the logical analysis of problems relevant to the processing of large bodies of symbolic data and in the formulation of solutions, according to the basic principles of Mathematical Logic and Programming. • Ability to author original algorithms and express them in the form of detailed flowcharts. • Ability to easily communicate and co-operate with Electrical Engineers and Software Engineers for the purposes of developing original software applications. See “Papers” (1), (4). • Elementary experience with code written in the programming languages Pascal, C++, SQL, TCL, Perl, and Prolog.

Teaching Experience 1992 - 2008

Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in the following foreign language tutorial schools:

• “EUROGNOSI”, F. Morphopoulos, P. Papadopoulos, P. Tsarkatzoglou (Pefki), 10/2006 – 05/2008.

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• Foreign Languages Anthi, E. Anthi-Vourli (N. Erythraea), V. Psimopoulou (Drosia), 09/2001 – 05/2003.

• Foreign Language Centre, V. Vazakas, N. Lalagiannis, V. ShevlaneMavroeidi (Vrilissia), 09/1992 – 06/1997. The author has taught students of 10-30 years of age and all the levels between the Pre-Intermediate and the Proficiency levels (Council of Europe Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, Levels A2 – C2). He has considerable experience in preparing candidates for the three major ESOL Examinations offered by the University of Cambridge: First Certificate in English (FCE), Certificate in Advanced English (CAE), Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE). In addition, he has experience in preparing candidates for the Examinations of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), and the Examination for the Certificate of Proficiency in English (ECPE) offered by the University of Michigan. He has actively participated in the organization of TESOL syllabuses since 2001.

Translation Experience 2001

Translation and subtitling of English documentaries into Greek for Lumiére Cosmos Communications Ltd.

2001

Translations of Greek short stories for children into English for Patakis Publishers.

2005 - 2009

Membership in Professional Organisations International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

Honours and Awards 2004 - 2008

Research Scholarship, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP).

2000 - 2001

Research Scholarship, University of Sheffield.

2000

The author ranked first among the graduates of the Department of English Language and Linguistics of the University of Sheffield for the Academic Year 1999-2000, having been awarded a Class One Honours degree. He has been awarded two prizes by the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, Professor Sir Gareth Roberts:

2000

• Colin Stork Prize in Linguistics, 15/08/2000

1999

• Colin Stork Prize in Practical Phonetics, 20/08/1999

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State Licences and Recognitions 2002

• The author’s BA in English Language with Linguistics has been recognized by ∆ΙΚΑΤΣΑ as equivalent (“isotimo”) to the degrees awarded by Greek Universities.

1992

• “Adeia Didaskalias” (Teaching Licence) for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in private tutorial schools.

1990

• “Adeia Eparkeias Prosondon” (Certificate of Professional Adequacy) for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in private tutorial schools.

Interests, Other Activities Music (drums, vocals), cinema, freehand drawing.

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Appendix: List of Academic Subjects “TECHNOGLOSSIA”

Human Language Technologies (MSc)

1st Semester: Basic Mathematical Concepts • Introduction to Programming Languages • Introduction to Databases • The Mechanisms of Voice Production and the Phonetic Signal in Computers • Introduction to Quantitative Linguistics – Probability Theory and Statistics in language-related applications. 2nd Semester: Text Corpora Processing • Logic and Language • Introduction to Logical Programming • Introduction to Electronic Lexicography • Machine Translation. 3rd Semester: The Architecture of Natural Language Processing Systems • Information Extraction from Electronic Texts • Natural Language Parsing • Human Voice Analysis and Modelling • Grammar Formalisms in Computational Linguistics. 4th Semester (Seminars): Computational Intelligence (Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms) • Formal Semantics • Natural Language Generation Systems • Principles of Software Design for Language Teaching • The Lexico-Syntactic Categorization of Lemmas – lexicographic applications.

English Language with Linguistics (BA)

Linguistics Modules: Introduction to Linguistics • Phonetics • Phonology • Semantics • Pragmatics • Sociolinguistics • Language and Mind (Psycholinguistics) • Lexicology • Lexicography • Language Change • The History of Linguistics. English Language and Literature Modules: Introduction to Old English • Introduction to Middle English Language and Literature • Introduction to Advanced Literary Studies • Aspects of the Renaissance – Studies in the Renaissance Verse and Theatre • Language and Power • The Structure and Varieties of English • Introduction to English Syntax.

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