Slav Petrov (2014)

Slav Petrov has a Ph.D. in informatics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is head of the research group (Staff Research Scientist) at the New York office of Google. One of his major achievements over the past three years has been the improved algorithm for grammatical analysis, allowing a 200-fold increase in speed of analysis, which was distinguished as the best work at the international conference NAACL '11. Dr. Slav Petrov organizes and leads a new course in statistical natural language processing at New York University every winter semester since 2010. He is the author of a novel algorithm for grammatical analysis of new languages without additional knowledge in the presence of analysis developed in another language. His published results were honored as the best work at the international conference ACL '10 led by Dr. Slav Petrov's research group, consisting of seven research assistants, one of whom is Dr. Kuzman Ganchev, laureate of the John Atanasov Award for 2011. They were actively working on grammar addition of Google Translate. Subsequently their work has led to more accurate translations in more than 60 languages, including Bulgarian.