Kepa Sarasola

Kepa Sarasola is one of the main leaders of IXA, a research group working on Natural Language Processing that was created in 1988 with the aim of developing basic computational resources for Basque. Nowadays, the group is composed of 40 computer scientists, 10 linguists, 3 research technicians (http://ixa.si.ehu.es). The main products of this group are a spelling checker (Xuxen), a machine translation system (Matxin), Basque Wordnet (BasWN), a morphologically annotated corpus (Corpus of Science and Technology) and a syntactically annotated corpus (EPEC). These resources have proven to be useful tools to promote the use of Basque. Kepa Sarasola received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of the Basque Country in 1988 and has been Associate Professor in the Computer Science Faculty since 1981. He has supervised eight PhD theses and has been the site coordinator and work package leader for 14 major projects. He is member of SALTMIL SIG Committee since 2000 (ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages). He has published over 60 international refereed articles and conference papers in Natural Language Processing, mainly in the areas of Syntax and Machine Translation. His current major projects are QTleap European STREP project (http://qtleap.eu) and TACARDI project (http://ixa.si.ehu.es./tacardi) from Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.