Jesus Gimenez

My research interests relate to Machine Learning applied to Natural Language Processing and to the study of Evaluation Methods.

Initially, I worked on the problem of sequential tagging. I implemented the SVMTool which is still in use by the research community worldwide. Then, for almost a decade I studied the application of empirical methods to Machine Translation, which was great because it gave me freedom to play on different subproblems. I ended up focusing, however, on the lexical selection problem, building discriminative models. Moreover, throughout my experience on MT I realised how important evaluation methods are along the system development cycle in NLP tasks, and decided to study manual and automatic evaluation methods more closely. I designed and built novel automatic similarity measures based on linguistic processing of texts and integrated them inside the Asiya Open Toolkit. Finally, in 2011, Google happenned to be looking for somebody exactly like me. I was run a job opportunity, and I decided to join them!

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesusgimenez

STUDIES:

Doctor of Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, 2008. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Natural Language Processing Group.
European Masters Study in Language and Speech , "Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya". 1999 - 2001. ISCA / EACL International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), European Associaton for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Natural Language Processing and Speech Processing.
Bachelor of Computer Science, 1995 - 2001. "Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya". Specialized in Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Data Mining.

EXPERIENCE:

March 2011 - ... - as Analytical Linguist at Google.
March 2010 - March 2011 - as post-doc researcher in the AI section NLP group, "Technical University of Catalonia". FAUST project (FP7-ICT-2009-4-247762, EC, 2010-2012), on feedback analysis for user adaptive statistical translation.
October 2009 - January 2010 as senior visiting researcher at ExperienceOn Ventures. I work on the development of Natural Language Processing Technology for domain-oriented Information Retrieval.
June 2007 - October 2009 as specialized research assistant, in the AI section NLP group, "Technical University of Catalonia". OpenMT project (TIN2006-15307-C03-02), on the development of open source machine translation software using hybrid methods.
May 2008 - September 2009 as technological project leader at Semantix Group (formerly, Lingo Research Labs). I worked on the incorporation of current NLP technology into the company's products and services.
June 2003 - May 2007 as a phd student granted by the Spanish Ministery of Science and Technology, in the AI section NLP group, "Technical University of Catalonia". ALIADO project (TIC2002-04447-C02), about the study and development of language and speech technology for mobile personal digital assitants (pda's) in a multilingual environment.
April 2002 - May 2003 as a research intern, in the AI section NLP group, "Technical University of Catalonia". LC-STAR project, on the generation of resources, namely speech signal, lexica and corpora for speech to speech translation components.
February 2001 - november 2001 as a research intern, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratories , Santa Barbara, CA, USA. Speech recognition group. End of Degree project, "A database architecure for efficient design of acoustic models", describing the construction of an information system thought to efficiently give support the requirements of the software training algorithms.
January 2000 - February 2001. JEDI (Young Computer Science Students) as a junior analyst and programmer, responsible for the construction of a stock management information system for a small company, (Visual Basic - SQL Server 7.0).

TEACHING:

2005-2006 Introduction to Logics. Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB). Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

PUBLICATIONS:

Doctoral Dissertation

Jesús Giménez. Empirical Machine Translation and its Evaluation. Ph.D. Thesis, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (defended July 2, 2008). [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

2011

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Màrquez. Linguistic Measures for Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation. To Appear in Machine Translation, Springer Netherlands, 2011. [.pdf]

2010

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Asiya: An Open Toolkit for Automatic Machine Translation (Meta-)Evaluation. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, No. 94, 2010. [.pdf] [slides]

Elisabet Comelles, Jesús Giménez, Lluís Márquez, Irene Castellón and Victoria Arranz. Document-level Automatic MT Evaluation based on Discourse Representations. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (at ACL'10). [.ps] [.pdf] [spot] [poster]

2009

Cristina España-Bonet, Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Discriminative Phrase-Based Models for Arabic Machine Translation.. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing Journal (Special Issue on Arabic Natural Language Processing). ACM TALIP 2009. [.pdf]

Enrique Amigó, Jesús Giménez and Felisa Verdejo. Procesamiento Lingüístico en Evaluación Automática de Traducciones. Proceedings SEPLN, 2009. [.pdf]

Enrique Amigó, Jesús Giménez, Julio Gonzalo and Felisa Verdejo. The Contribution of Linguistic Features to Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation. Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP, 2009. [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez Empirical Machine Translation and its Evaluation. Invited talk at the SMART Workshop (EAMT'09). [slides]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. On the Robustness of Syntactic and Semantic Features for Automatic MT Evaluation. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (at EACL'09). [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Miguel García, Jesús Giménez, and Lluís Márquez. Enriching Statistical Translation Models Using a Domain-Independent Multilingual Lexical Knowledge Base (Best Student Paper Award). Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing 2009). [.ps] [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Discriminative Phrase Selection for Statistical Machine Translation. In Learning Machine Translation. NIPS Workshop Series. MIT Press. [.ps] [.pdf] Talk at GLiCom. [slides]

2008

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Discriminative Phrase Selection for Statistical Machine Translation . In Learning Machine Translation. NIPS Workshop Series. MIT Press. [.ps] [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. A Smorgasbord of Features for Automatic MT Evaluation. Proceedings of the 3rd ACL Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (shared evaluation task). [.ps] [.pdf] [poster] [spot]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Towards Heterogeneous Automatic MT Error Analysis . Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08). [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Cristina España-Bonet, Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. The UPC-lsi Discriminative Phrase Selection System: NIST MT Evaluation 2008 . Proceedings of the 2008 NIST Open Machine Translation Evaluation Workshop. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides] [mt-eval slides]

Jesús Giménez. Towards Heterogeneous Automatic MT Evaluation . Talk at the TALP NLP group seminar. [slides]

Jesús Giménez. Empirical Machine Translation and its Evaluation . Talk at the Master on Cognitive Science and Language. Aplicacions del Llenguatge Natural. [slides]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Heterogeneous Automatic MT Evaluation Through Non-Parametric Metric Combinations . To appear in Proceedings of IJCNLP 2008. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

2007

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Linguistic Features for Automatic Evaluation of Heterogeneous MT Systems . Proceedings of WMT 2007 (ACL'07). [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Context-aware Discriminative Phrase Selection for Statistical Machine Translation . Proceedings of WMT 2007 (ACL'07). [.ps] [.pdf] [spot]

Jesús Giménez. IQMT: A Framework for Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation based on Human Likeness. Technical Report LSI-07-29-R. [.ps] [.pdf]

David Farwell, Jesús Giménez, Edgar González, Reda Halkoum, Horacio Rodríguez and Mihai Surdeanu. The UPC System for Arabic-to-English Entity Translation . Proceedings of ACE 2007. [.ps] [.pdf]

2006

Patrik Lambert, Jesús Giménez, Marta R. Costa-jussá, Enrique Amigó, Rafael E. Banchs, Lluís Márquez and J.A. R. Fonollosa. Machine Translation System Development based on Human Likeness. Proceedings of IEEE/ACL 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology. [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez.Low-cost Enrichment of Spanish WordNet with Automatically Translated Glosses: Combining General and Specialized Models. Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006. [.ps] [.pdf]

Enrique Amigó, Jesús Giménez, Julio Gonzalo and Lluís Márquez. MT Evaluation: Human-like vs. Human Acceptable. Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006. [.ps] [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Màrquez. The LDV-COMBO system for SMT. Proceedings of the NAACL 2006 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. [.ps] [.pdf]

Jesús Giménez and Enrique Amigó. IQMT: A Framework for Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06). Genoa, Italy, 22-28 May. 2006. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

2005

Jesús Giménez, Enrique Amigó and Chiori Hori. Machine Translation Evaluation Inside QARLA. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (IWSLT'05). Pittsburgh, PA, USA October 24-25 2005. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Jesús Giménez, Lluís Márquez and German Rigau. Automatic Translation of WordNet Glosses. Eurolan Cross-Language Knowledge Induction Workshop. Cluj-Napoca, Romania, july 25 - August 5, 2005. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Jesús Giménez. Rich Linguistic Knowledge for Empirical Machine Translation. PhD Thesis Project. LSI Department. Technical University of Catalonia, 2005. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Combining Linguistic Data Views for Phrase-based SMT. ACL Workshop on ``Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data-Driven Machine Translation and Beyond''. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June 29-30, 2005. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Lluís Màrquez, Pere Comas, Jesús Giménez and Neus Català. Semantic Role Labeling as Sequential Tagging. Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CONLL'05). Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June 29-30, 2005. [.pdf]

2004

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell i Jesús Giménez. Creació de recursos lingüístics per a la traducció automàtica. 2n Congrés d'Enginyeria en Llengua Catalana. (CELC'04). Andorra, 2004. [.pdf] [slides]

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell y Jesús Giménez. Creación de recursos lingüísticos para la traducción automática. III Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla. Valencia, Spain. 2004. [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]

Folkert de Vriend, Núria Castell, Jesús Giménez and Giulio Maltese. LC-STAR: XML-coded Phonetic Lexica and Bilingual Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the Papillon Workshop on Multilingual Lexical Databases. Grenoble, France. 2004 . [.pdf] [slides]

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. SVMTool: A general POS tagger generator based on Support Vector Machines. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04), vol. I, pages 43 - 46. Lisbon, Portugal, 2004. (ISBN 2-9517408-1-6) [.ps] [.pdf] [slides] SVMTool [free download] Departament Research Report (LSI-04-34-R), Technical University of Catalonia, 2004. [.ps] [.pdf]

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell, Josep Maria Crego, Jesús Giménez, Adrià de Gispert and Patrik Lambert. Bilingual Connections for Trilingual Corpora: An XML Approach. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04), vol. IV, pages 1459 - 1462. Lisbon, Portugal. 2004 . (ISBN 2-9517408-1-6) [.ps] [.pdf] [poster]

2003

Jesús Giménez and Lluís Márquez. Fast and Accurate Part-of-Speech Tagging: The SVM Approach Revisited. In Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP - 2003 (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing), pages 158 - 165. September, 10-12, 2003. Borovets, Bulgary. (ISBN 954-90906-6-3) [.ps] [.pdf] [slides]. Selected as a chapter in RANLP 2003 volume in CILT series (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory). John Benjamins Publishers, Amsterdam.

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell and Jesús Giménez. Development of Language Resources for Speech-to-Speech Translation. In Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP - 2003 (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing), pages 26 - 30. September, 10-12, 2003. Borovets, Bulgary. [.ps] [.pdf] [poster]

David Conejero, Jesús Giménez, Victoria Arranz, Antonio Bonafonte, Neus Pascual, Núria Castell and Asunción Moreno. Lexica and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech translation: A Trilingual Approach. In Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (EuroSpeech 2003). September, 1-4, 2003. Geneva, Switzerland. (ISSN 1018-4074) [.ps] [.pdf]

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell, Jesús Giménez, Hermann Ney and Nicola Ueffing. Description of language resources used for experiments Technical Report Deliverable D4.2, LC-STAR project by the European Community (IST project ref. No. 2001-32216), 2003.

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell, Jesús Giménez and Asunción Moreno. Description of raw corpora. Technical Report Deliverable 5.3, LC-STAR project by the European Community (IST project ref. No. 2001-32216), 2003.

Victoria Arranz, Núria Castell and Jesús Giménez. Speech Corpora Creation for Tourist Domain. LSI Department Technical Report (LSI-03-2-T), Technical University of Catalonia, 2003.

PARTICIPATON IN CONFERENCE/JOURNAL PROGRAM COMMITTEES:

The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (PBML). Special Issue on "Open Source Tools for Machine Translation". 2010.
International Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2010.
23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. COLING 2010
Machine Translation Journal. Special Issue on "Pushing the frontier of Statistical Machine Translation". 2010.
ACL 2010 Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics MATR.
48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL 2010.
Human Language Technologies: The 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. NAACL-HLT 2010.
The seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. LREC 2010.
Machine Translation Summit XII. MT-SUMMIT 2009.
International Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2009.
Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing. ACL-IJCNLP 2009.
Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (at EACL). WMT 2009.
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies. NAACL HLT 2009.
13th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. EAMT 2009.
12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. EACL 2009.
Student Research Workshop at the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. AMTA 2008.
Workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics at the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. HJCL'08 at COLING 2008.
XXIV edición del Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. SEPLN 2008.
The 11th Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation. TMI 2007.
45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL 2007.
Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI 2007.
International Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2006.
Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI 2006.
11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. EACL 2006.
Espana for Natural Language Processing. ESTAL 2004.

COURSES/CONFERENCES:

AMTA 2010. Denver, CO, USA. October 31 - November 4, 2010.
MT Marathon 2010. Le Mans, France. 13-18 September, 2010.
ACL 2010 Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics MATR (WMT at ACL 2010). Uppsala, Sweden. July 15-16, 2010.
14th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2010). May 27-28, 2010.
Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT at EACL 2009). Athens, Greece. March 30-31, 2009.
13th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. (EAMT 2009). Barcelona, Spain. May 14-15, 2009.
NIST 2008 Metrics MATR Challenge at the Eighth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA 2008). Waikiki, Hawai'i, USA. October 25, 2008.
"Mixing Approaches to Machine Translation" workshop (MATMT 2008). Donostia, Spain. February 14, 2008.
The Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2008). Hyderabad, India. January 7-12, 2008.
45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007). Prague, Czech Republic, June 23-30, 2007.
44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2006). Sydney, Australia, July 17-21, 2006.
5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06). Genoa, Italy. May 24-26, 2006 .
International Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (IWSLT'05). Pittsburgh, PA, USA October 24-25 2005.
Eurolan Cross-Language Knowledge Induction Workshop. Cluj-Napoca, Romania, july 25 - August 5, 2005.
Eurolan Summer School 2005. Cluj-Napoca, Romania, july 25 - August 5, 2005.
ACL Workshop on ``Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data-Driven Machine Translation and Beyond''. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June 29-30, 2005.
Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CONLL'05). Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June 29-30, 2005.
43nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005). Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June 29-30, 2005.
2n Congrés d'Enginyeria en Llengua Catalana. (CELC'04). Andorra, 2004.
2004 Papillon Workshop on Mulitlingual Lexical Databases. Grenoble, France, August 30 - September 1, 2004.
42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2004). Barcelona, Spain, July 22-24, 2004.
2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2004). Barcelona, Spain July 25-26, 2004.
4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04). Lisbon, Portugal. May 26-28, 2004 .
NLP Workshop by the IXA Research Group. Hondarribia, Gipuzkoa, Spain. February 5-6, 2004.
International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP '03). September 10-12, 2003. Borovets, Bulgaria.
Statistical Processing of Natural Language. Hermann Ney. March 2003. Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain.
Introduction to Microsoft C#. Microsoft Iberica, S.R.L. January-February, 2003. Barcelona, Spain.
Language Technology Course: Machine Translation. July 15-19, 2002. Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, Barcelona, Spain.
Business Integration Methodology. Accenture. March 2002. Barcelona, Spain.
8th ELSNET Summer School, Text And Speech Triggered Information Access (TeSTIA'2000). July 15-30, 2000. Chios, Grecia.
9th Conference on Advanced Techniques in Computer Science. (JETAI'98). March 25-27, 1998. Zaragoza, Spain.

SPECIAL MERITS:

2010 Best Thesis Award from the European Association for Machine Translation.
2009 Best monographic work at the "VIII Edición de los premios SEPLN de Investigación en Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural" from the Sociedad Española Para el Procesamiento del Lenguage Natural (SEPLN).
Best Student Paper at the 10th International Conference, CICLing 2009, Mexico City, Mexico, March 1-7, 2009.

SOFTWARE:

LANGUAGES: