Preslav’s research interests include computational linguistics, machine translation, lexical semantics, Web as a corpus, and biomedical text processing.

At QCRI, he works on Arabic language processing, with an emphasis on machine translation to/from Arabic, both written and spoken.

Before joining QCRI, Preslav was a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore for three years, where he worked on text and spoken language machine translation for Asian languages, including Chinese, Malay and Indonesian. Prior to that, Preslav spent nine months at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Sofia University, where he was an honorary lecturer. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007 (supported by a Fulbright grant and a UC Berkeley fellowship).

• National University of Singapore, Research Fellow, 2008-2011
• Sofia University, Honorary Lecturer, 2008
• Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, post-doc, 2008
• University of California at Berkeley, Research Assistant, 2003-2007
• University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, summer intern, 2005
• Rila Solutions, Programmer Analyst, 2000-2002
• Comsoft Ltd, RDBMS developer, 1996-2000

Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003-present

• Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, USA, 2007
• M.Sc. and B.Sc., Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria, 2001

• JAIR (journal): Improving Statistical Machine Translation for a Resource-Poor Language Using Related Resource-Rich Languages Preslav Nakov, HweeTou Ng, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), vol. 44, pp. 179-222, May 2012. http://www.jair.org/papers/paper3540.html
• Advances in Bioinformatics (journal): Do Peers See More in a Paper than its Authors? Anna Divoli, Preslav Nakov, and Marti Hearst, Advances in Bioinformatics, June 2012. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/abi/aip/750214/
• EMNLP’2012: Source Language Adaptation for Resource-Poor Machine Translation Pidong Wang, Preslav Nakov, HweeTou Ng http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1027.pdf
• ACL’2012: Combining Word-Level and Character-Level Models for Machine Translation Between Closely-Related Languages Preslav Nakov, Jorg Tiedemann http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P12/P12-2059.pdf
• EACL’2012: Feature-rich Part-of-speech Tagging for Morphologically Complex Languages: Application to Bulgarian Georgi Georgiev, Valentin Zhikov, Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova, Preslav Nakov http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/E/E12/E12-1050.pdf
• WMT’2012: QCRI at WMT12: Experiments in Spanish-English and German-English Machine Translation of News Text Francisco Guzman, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Thabet, Stephan Vogel http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W12/W12-3136.pdf