The Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona was founded in 1990 as a public university with a strong dedication to research. Since then, UPF has been decisively involved in the creation of new intensive knowledge-based technologies at the national and European levels in a number of areas, among them, Media and Communication Technologies. It participates with the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DICT), which focuses on research on multilingual text generation, summarization and simplification, information extraction, (deep) syntactic analysis, computational lexicology and expressive speech recognition and synthesis.

Project role:

Technical Partner; WP leader

Responsibilities:

• WP6 (Lead)
• participation in WP 2: Concept extraction; Conceptual relation extraction
• participation in WP 6: All tasks related to summarization of multimedia material
• participation in WP 7: Integration of the concept/concept relation extraction and summarization services into the overall Multisensor platform.

People involved:

Prof. Leo Wanner	received his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of the Saarland, Germany. Currently, he is ICREA Research Professor at the UPF and head of the NLP Group at DICT. Before joining UPF, Wanner held positions at the German National Center for Computer Science, the University of Waterloo, the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and the University of Stuttgart. Prof Wanner has an extensive publishing curriculum – in particular in multilingual text generation, summarization, and extraction and semantic classification of linguistic idiosyncrasies from corpora – and a long-standing experience in cutting edge European research and project coordination in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. In MULTISENSOR, Wanner is the PI of the UPF team and leader ofWP6.
Dr. Horacio Saggion	holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Montreal, Canada. He obtained his BSc in Computer Science from Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, and his MSc in Computer Science from UNICAMP in Brazil. Horacio is currently a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the DICT. He is associated with the Natural Language Processing group, where he works on automatic text summarization, text simplification, information extraction, sentiment analysis and related topics. His research focuses on empirical combining symbolic, pattern-based approaches and statistical and machine learning techniques. Before joining UPF, he worked at the University of Sheffield. He was also an invited researcher at John Hopkins University. Horacio has published over 70 works in leading scientific journals, conferences, and books in the field of human language technology. In MULTISENSOR, Horacio is in charge of extractive mono- and multi-document summarization and also involved in tasks related to the definition and application of content-oriented content selection (summarization) metrics.
Dr. Miguel Ballesteros	received his PhD and MsC in Computer Science from the Complutense University of Madrid. After his PhD studies, he joined the DICT as Visiting Lecturer and the NLP group as researcher. During the last years, Miguel was also Visiting Researcher at the Universities of Uppsala and Singapore. His current research interests revolve around statistical (deep) syntactic analysis and generation. In MULTISENSOR, Miguel will be involved in tasks related to deep syntactic analysis and concept /concept relation extraction.
Dr. Alicia Burga	received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and her Master in Computational Linguistics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Alicia is a Senior Researcher in the NLP group of DICT, UPF, where she works as specialist in the creation of treebanks for different NLP applications and in expressive speech analysis and generation. In MULTISENSOR, Alicia is involved in corpus annotation and evaluation activities.
Gerard Casamayor	is a researcher and PhD student in the NLP group of the DICT, UPF. Gerard is a specialist in Semantic Web, ontologies for NLP use and content selection techniques for natural language text generation. In MULTISENSOR, Gerard is in charge of content selection for summarization, the interface between the conceptual layer and ontologies and the integration of the summarization module into the MULTISENSOR platform.
Dr. Joan Codina	received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Catalonia. Currently, he holds a position of Adjunct Professor at the UPF and Senior Researcher at the NLP group of DICT. Dr. Codina is a renowned specialist in semantic text mining technologies, semantic search, clustering and classification. In MULTISENSOR, Dr Codina is involved in the task of mapping of conceptual data onto ontologies.
Simon Mille	is a researcher and PhD student in the NLP group of the DICT, UPF. Simon is working on linguistic aspects of multilingual text generation and on resource creation for text generation and syntactic analysis. In MULTISENSOR, Simon is in charge of the creation of resources (treebanks, grammars, and lexica) for summary generation and definition of the interface to the Machine Translation service provided by Linguatec.