[Corpora-List] Obituary Elena Paskaleva

[milena at lml.bas.bg]

We are sorry to inform you that Professor Elena Paskaleva, the founder of
Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria, passed away on 8 January 2014.

Elena Paskaleva was an interdisciplinary specialist, who, as a student at
the University of Sofia, devoted herself to two scientific fields –
linguistics and computer science. Before graduating in Russian philology,
she became an assistant of one of the pioneers in machine translation in
Eastern Europe - Professor Alexander Lyudskanov, who, at that time, was
the head of the department of machine translation in the Institute of
Mathematics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1965 and 1972,
Elena Paskaleva contributed to the creation of a Russian-Bulgarian
translation prototype of the Minsk-2 machine. She then became a PhD
student in structural and applied linguistics in the Moscow State
University. After receiving her Doctoral degree, she returned to the
Institute of Mathematics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Later she
joined the Linguistic Modelling Laboratory of the Coordination Centre of
Informatics and Computing Technology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
(at present the Linguistic Modelling Department of the Institute of
Information and Communication Technologies) where she worked for more than
two decades. For a long period of time she was also the head of the
Linguistic Modelling Department.
As a researcher in the field of computational linguistics, Elena Paskaleva
developed language resources for Bulgarian following the best
international practices and standards. She actively participated in
projects within the TEMPUS, COST and COPERNICUS programmes of the European
Union. She succeeded in transforming the descriptive language
formalisations of the Russian school to the application oriented models of
the Western European computational linguistics. She became the well-known
leader of a dynamic group of young computer scientists and linguists
devoted to the computer-oriented modelling of the Bulgarian language. In
1994, a big morphological lexicon of Bulgarian was completed, which has
been widely used for morphological analysis and synthesis. The lexicon
enhanced the development of up-to-date text processing technologies and
has served as an educational tool and experimental basis for a whole
generation of computer scientists who later developed spelling checkers,
rapid morphological analysers of Bulgarian texts, stemmers for Bulgarian,
part-of-speech taggers, etc. Elena Paskaleva also pioneered the
development of corpus linguistics in Bulgaria. She is the author of more
than 100 scientific papers and several books among which the recently
published electronic book "Computational morphology – resources and
tools".
We will remember Elena Paskaleva for her never ending enthusiasm,
liveliness, and remarkable sense of humour.

On behalf of the Institute of Information and Computation Technologies,
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences



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