PLENARY SPEAKERS
[in alphabetical order]Nikolay Boldyrev
Dr. Nikolay Nikolayevich Boldyrev is the director of the Cognitive Research Centre, a professor in the Philology Department at Tambov State University named after G.R.Derzhavin, the President of the Russian Cognitive Linguists Association and Honoured Scholar of The Russian Federation. He received his doctoral degree in English Philology in 1995 at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg. His doctoral dissertation focused on the problems of dynamic (functional) categorization of the English verb. His grant history started in 1994 with AIREX grant for research in Cognitive linguistics centre at Texas University, Austin. More recently his research has dealt with the problems of linguistic interpretation in the processes of world construction and its representation in language. Within this line of research, he has supervised as a leader the research projects entitled "Language as a conceptual system", "Study of cognitive processes through language", both funded by RF Ministry of education special-purpose programme of research (for 2006-2009 and for 2009-2011), "Types of knowledge in Language", funded by the RF federal special-purpose programme of research (2010-2012), "Evaluative world categorization in Russian and West-European languages", funded by The Russian Foundation for Humanities (2010-2012), "Language as system of representation and interpretation of knowledge", funded by RF Ministry of education special-purpose programme of research (2011-2014), "Language as an Interpretive Factor of World Construction", funded by The Russian Foundation for Humanities, (for 2015-2017, research project No. 15-04-00448). His latest works, within the project "A cognitive study of anthropocentric nature of language", funded by the Russian Science Foundation (for 2015-2017, research grant No. 15-18-10006), are related to the problems of correlation between language, mind, and cognition, specifically to the leading role of human interpretation in linguistic representation of the world and the knowledge of the world.
María del Carmen Fumero Pérez
Dr. María del Carmen Fumero Pérez is a senior lecturer in the Philology Department at the University of La Laguna where she also received her Ph.D. degree in English Philology in 2001. Her earlier works, deriving from her doctoral dissertation, focused on pragmatics and academic discourse analysis. More recently, as a member of the Lexicom Research Project, her research has dealt with the interaction between lexis and grammar in functional and cognitive models. Within this line of research, she has participated in the research projects entitled “Construction of a Core Grammar Spanish-English database within the Lexical Constructional Model” (Project No. FFI2008-05035-C02-02)” and “Design of English and Spanish Lexical and Argument-Construction Templates. Applications in Information Retrieval Systems within Multilingual Environments” (Project No.FFI2011-29798-C02-02), both funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science. Her latest works, within the project “Development of a virtual laboratory for natural language processing from a functional paradigm” (Project No. FFI2014-53788-C3-1-P), are related to the field of Natural Language Processing, specifically to the development of NLP tools and their applications.
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Dr Ricardo Mairal has been a Full Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages at the Spanish National Distance-Learning University (UNED) since 2002. His main areas of research interest are the architecture of the English lexicon, the representation of lexical knowledge, linguistic universals and the interactions between lexical semantics, syntax and morphology with particular reference to theoretical models, both formal and functional. He has been the head of various research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Regional Government of Madrid and has additionally participated in other projects that deal with various aspects of language research such as terminology, the compilation of lexical representations and linking mechanisms in Old English, natural language processing and the development of lexical databases for lexicography. He has co-authored or co-edited a number of books including: Nuevas perspectivas en Gramática Funcional (Ariel, 1999), Constructing a lexicon of English verbs (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), New perspectives on argument structure in Functional Grammar (Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), En torno a los universales lingüísticos (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Linguistic Universals (Cambridge University Press). He has also published over fifty scholarly articles which have appeared in specialised national and international journals. He has served as a scientific committee member for several specialised journals, including Cuadernos de Investigación Filología, Atlantis, RESLA, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, Onomázein and Functions of Language. He has done occasional review work for Cognitive Linguistics and Language Sciences and has also been a member of the advisory committee of various international conferences on Role and Reference Grammar. He has also lectured extensively as keynote speaker at national and international conferences on Applied and Theoretical Linguistics.
Carlos Periñán-Pascual
Dr Carlos Periñán-Pascual studied English Language and Literature at Universitat de València and received his Ph.D. degree in English Philology at UNED in Madrid. Since his doctoral dissertation on the resolution of word-sense disambiguation in machine translation, his main research interests have included knowledge engineering, natural language understanding and computational linguistics. As a result, he has been the director and founder of the FunGramKB project since 2004, whose main goal is to develop a lexico-conceptual knowledge base to be implemented in NLP systems requiring language comprehension. After the design and implementation of the knowledge base, he also developed some NLP tools for the FunGramKB Suite: (a) a multilingual workbench for term extraction and management with domain-specific corpora, (b) an application to categorize a collection of documents into the domains of the IATE database, (c) a system that helps researchers do corpus analysis as well as running statistical and machine-learning algorithms for data mining tasks, and (d) a parser that generates a full-fledged logical structure of a sentence, having Role and Reference Grammar as its linguistic model and FunGramKB as its knowledge base. Therefore, his research has also contributed to the fields of automatic term extraction, topic detection, semantic parsing, machine learning and data analytics. He is currently implementing the FunGramKB NLP Laboratory, a user-friendly workflow environment that is mainly intended for linguists to conduct their own research experiments in human language technology. His scientific production includes over 50 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of linguistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He is currently an associate professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain.