People Biography

Dr. Irina Temnikova has received her B.A. in Italian Translation&Linguistics, her M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Sofia University, Bulgaria, and her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Wolverhampton, UK.

She has worked as a translator from English, French, and Italian into Bulgarian and Russian for the European Parliament, a translator&interpreter in translation agencies for 10 years, and a language teacher. 

She was also a researcher in Computational Linguistics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and at the Language Technology Group, European Commission in Ispra, Italy. 

Due to her interdisciplinary expertise, her research interests focus on

the methods of collaborations between linguistics, human translation and natural language processing and machine translation.

Currently she is working on two projects: 

1. Using human interpreting strategies to improve automatic translation (in collaboration with HBKU TII).
2. Developing medical translation software for medical staff and patients in Qatar.

Irina is also actively involved in teaching and organising QCRI and ALT summer internships, as well as in organising international conferences&workshops abroad.

She has also completed a post-doc at the QCRI’s Social Computing group on crisis terminology and readability in Twitter. Other expertises are: eye-tracking, autistic readers, text simplification, specialized languages, translation technologies, corpus linguistics.