Prof. Dragomir Radev Receives U-M Faculty Recognition Award

Dragomir Radev, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Information, and Linguistics, has been selected to receive a Faculty Recognition Award by the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. This award recognizes “mid-career faculty who have demonstrated remarkable contributions to the University through outstanding achievements in scholarly research and/or creative endeavors; excellence as a teacher, advisor and mentor; and distinguished participation in the service activities of the university and elsewhere.”

Prof. Radev is a leader in the field of computational linguistics, which leverages techniques from computer science and linguistics and is concerned with the computational aspects of the human language faculty. His research takes place at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, bioinformatics, text and data mining, social networks, social media, collective behavior, text generation, information extraction, and artificial intelligence.

Prof. Radev’s current research projects are directed toward analyzing online discussions to identify leaders, influencers, and subgroups; mining scientific papers and citation and collaboration networks to predict the future impact of new technologies; automatic generation of summaries and surveys on scientific topics and analyzing the diversity in online content written by large groups of contributors.

Past projects have included “News in Essence,” the world’s first online multidocument news summarization system. The system employed information retrieval, natural language processing, and information extraction to categorize, distill, and present and analyze targeted information on current events. A summary of additional research projects can be found at the website for his Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval (CLAIR) research group.

Prof. Radev has been exceptionally active in outreach. He is co-founder and program chair of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), an annual contest in which high school student teams solve linguistic and natural-language processing problems. Close to two thousand students from across the United States and Canada competed in NACLO last year. Finalists from NACLO compete each year in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), and Prof. Radev has served as head coach of the US team at IOL since 2007.

Prof. Radev received his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999 and joined the faculty at Michigan in 2000. He received a UROP Faculty Recognition Award for Outstanding Research Mentorship in 2004, and the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology in 2006. In 2011, NACLO was recognized with the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics, Language and the Public Award. He is the Secretary of the Association for Computational Linguistics and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

The award will be conferred at a ceremony held by the Rackham Graduate School later this fall.

He teaches EECS 595, Natural Language Processing, as well as other courses on subjects such as Information Retrieval.