Gerard de Melo

International Computer Science Institute
1947 Center Street
Berkeley, CA 94704
USA

	@
demelo	@		icsi.berkeley.edu

Curriculum Vitae

I am currently a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley working as a post-doc in the AI/FrameNet group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).
Previously, I was a member of the Databases and Information Systems Group headed by Gerhard Weikum at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, receiving my doctoral degree from Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany in 2010.
In 2011, I spent 4 amazing months at the Machine Learning and Perception Group of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Current Research Foci

Web and Text Mining, especially to produce large-scale repositories of semantic knowledge about entities and their relationships
Integrating and ranking information from heterogeneous data sources
Applications of Machine Learning, Graph Algorithms to Web, Natural Language Processing, and Data Integration Problems

Resources

UWN/MENTA: A large-scale multilingual lexical knowledge base built using statistical methods, transforming the well-known WordNet database into a massively multilingual resource covering over 1 million words and several million named entities in a single large multilingual taxonomy.
Lexvo.org: Contributes information about words and other language-related entities to the Linked Data Web and Semantic Web, leading to a Web of Data in which the British Library, the Spanish National Library, and others have linked their data to Lexvo.org, and Lexvo.org in turn connects its own data to other valuable resources.
YAGO-SUMO Integration: An ontology providing an enormous body of axiomatized world knowledge based on YAGO as well as the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).
SPASS-XDB: Online interface to the SPASS-XDB reasoning system, which combines state-of-the-art theorem proving with support for large-scale knowledge sources
MTRogets: Thesauri in many languages, obtained by translating Roget's Thesaurus using task-specific statistical techniques
Etymological Wordnet: A database of etymological and derivational relationships between words in different languages, mined from Wiktionary.
Online Transliteration Service: A service that for instance will transliterate the Greek "ψυχολογία" into "psychología".
Wikipedia IMDb Mappings: Mappings between Wikipedia articles and corresponding Internet Movie Database entries (Download)

Awards and Recognition

Best Demonstration Award (with Johannes Hoffart, Fabian Suchanek, Klaus Berberich, Edwin Lewis-Kelham, Gerhard Weikum)
20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011)
Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award (out of 945 full paper submissions)
19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010)
Best Paper Award
International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources (ICGL 2008)
Nominee for Best German/Swiss/Austrian Computer Science Dissertation 2010 (GI-Dissertationspreis 2010)
Doctoral Scholarship: 2007-2010
IMPRS-CS
Foreign Studies Scholarship: 2004-2005, Université de Montréal, Canada
German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Scholarship: 2003-2006
German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Online-Scholarship (alumnus)
e-fellows.net

Publications

Empirical Comparisons of MASC Word Sense Annotations
Gerard de Melo, Collin F. Baker, Nancy Ide, Rebecca Passonneau, Christiane Fellbaum (to appear)
In: Proc. LREC 2012. ELRA.
Deriving a Web-Scale Common Sense Fact Database PDF BibTeX
Niket Tandon, Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2011)
In: Proc. AAAI 2011. San Francisco, CA, USA.
Graphenbasierte Methoden zur multilingualen Wissensintegration
Gerard de Melo (2011)
In: Ausgezeichnete Informatikdissertationen 2010, Gesellschaft für Informatik / Springer LNI D-11.
An Application: Extending SUMO with Wikipedia (Book Chapter)
Gerard de Melo, Fabian Suchanek, Adam Pease (2011)
In: Adam Pease. Ontology: A Practical Guide. Articulate Software, USA. ISBN: 1-889455-10-5.
YAGO2: Exploring and Querying World Knowledge in Time, Space, Context, and Many Languages (Demo Paper) PDF BibTeX
Johannes Hoffart, Fabian Suchanek, Klaus Berberich, Edwin Lewis-Kelham, Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2011)
In: Proc. 20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011)
**Best Demonstration Award**
Graph-based Methods for Large-Scale Multilingual Knowledge Integration PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo (2010)
Doctoral Dissertation. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Committee: Gert Smolka, Gerhard Weikum, Hans Uszkoreit, Hinrich Schütze
Grade: summa cum laude
MENTA: Inducing Multilingual Taxonomies from Wikipedia PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2010)
In: Proc. 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), Toronto, Canada. ACM, New York, USA.
Acceptance rate: 13.3%.
**Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award** (out of 945 full paper submissions)
Information Extraction from Web-Scale N-Gram Data PDF BibTeX
Niket Tandon, Gerard de Melo (2010)
In: Proc. Web N-gram Workshop at SIGIR 2010.
Untangling the Cross-Lingual Link Structure of Wikipedia PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2010)
In: Proc. 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010), Uppsala, Sweden.
Constructing and Utilizing Wordnets using Statistical Methods BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (to appear)
Journal Language Resources and Evaluation, Springer Verlag, Dordrecht, Netherlands.
Providing Multilingual, Multimodal Answers to Lexical Database Queries PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2010)
In: Proc. 7th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2010), ELRA, Paris, France.
Progress Towards Effective Automated Reasoning with World Knowledge PDF BibTeX
Geoff Sutcliffe, Martin Suda, Alexandra Teyssandier, Nelson Dellis, Gerard de Melo (2010)
In: Proc. 23rd International FLAIRS Conference, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, USA.
Towards Universal Multilingual Knowledge Bases PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2010)
In: Principles, Construction, and Applications of Multilingual Wordnets. Proc. 5th Global Wordnet Conference (GWC 2010), Narosa Publishing, New Delhi, India.
Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidence PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2009)
In: Proc. 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), Hong Kong, China. ACM, New York, USA.
Acceptance rate: 14.5%.
Extracting Sense-Disambiguated Example Sentences From Parallel Corpora PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2009)
In: Proc. Workshop on Definition Extraction at RANLP 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria.
External Sources of Axioms in Automated Theorem Proving PDF BibTeX
Martin Suda, Geoff Sutcliffe, Patrick Wischnewski, Manuel Lamotte-Schubert, Gerard de Melo (2009)
In: Proc. 32nd Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2009), Springer-Verlag (LNAI 5803), Berlin / Heidelberg, Germany.
Integrating YAGO into the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (Short Paper) PDF BibTeX Technical Report
Gerard de Melo, Fabian Suchanek, Adam Pease (2008)
In: Proc. 20th IEEE ICTAI 2008, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA.
Language as a Foundation of the Semantic Web (Poster Paper) PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2008)
In: Proc. Poster And Demonstration Session of the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008), CEUR Vol. 401, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Mapping Roget's Thesaurus and WordNet to French PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2008)
In: Proc. 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), ELRA, Paris, France.
A Machine Learning Approach to Building Aligned Wordnets PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2008)
In: Proc. International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources (ICGL 2008), Hong Kong, China.
**Best Paper Award**
On the Utility of Automatically Generated Wordnets PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2007)
In: Proc. Fourth Global WordNet Conference (GWC 2008), Szeged, Hungary.
Multilingual Text Classification using Ontologies PDF BibTeX
Gerard de Melo, Stefan Siersdorfer (2007)
In: Proc. 29th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2007), Rome, Italy, Springer-Verlag (LNCS 4425), Berlin / Heidelberg, Germany.
Acceptance Rate: 27.7%
Adaptive Multilingual Text Classification using Ontologies
Gerard de Melo (2006)
Diplomarbeit (Master Thesis). Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Invited Talks

(not including paper presentations at conferences)

Graph-Based Methods for Large-Scale Multilingual Knowledge Integration.
Keynote Speaker at Logics and Ontologies for Portuguese Workshop. Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. November 2011
Graph-Based Methods for Large-Scale Multilingual Knowledge Integration.
University of Cambridge, UK. July 2011
Graph-Based Data Integration Techniques for Knowledge about Words and Entities
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. April 2011
Large-Scale Data Integration Techniques for Knowledge about Words and Entities.
INRIA Saclay, Orsay, France. March 2011
Constructing Large-Scale Semantic Knowledge Bases.
Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. November 2009

Professional Activities

GSCL 2013: Programme Committee Member
ACL 2012: Programme Committee Member
WWW 2012: Programme Committee Member
ESWC 2012: Programme Committee Member
ECML-PKDD 2012: Programme Committee Member (Demo Track)
KONVENS 2012: Area Chair
ACL 2012 Workshop on The People’s Web meets NLP: Programme Committee Member
Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics: Reviewer (2012)
Springer Journal Knowledge and Information Systems: Reviewer (2012)
Springer book 'The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Language Resources': Reviewer (2012)
DGfS 2012 Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Programme Committee Member
Elsevier Artificial Intelligence Journal: Reviewer (2011)
CIKM 2011: Programme Committee Member (Demonstration Track)
Springer Language Resources and Evaluation: Reviewer (2011)
ISWC 2011 2nd Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web: Programme Committee Member
EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties: Programme Committee Member
ACL HLT 2011: Programme Committee Member
CLA 2011: Programme Committee Member
Elsevier Artificial Intelligence Journal: Reviewer (2010)
International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management: Reviewer (2010)
CLA 2010: Programme Committee Member
COLING 2010 Workshop on The People’s Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources: Programme Committee member
AP-CAP 2009: Reviewer
CLA 2009: Programme Committee Member
20th IEEE ICTAI 2008: Session Chair for AI Algorithms I session

Teaching

1-Week Course on 'Text Mining and Natural Language Processing' (co-taught with Valeria de Paiva), Fundação Getúlio Vargas, November 2011
Teaching Assistant for Lecture 'Information Retrieval and Data Mining', Universität des Saarlandes, Winter 2007/08
Internship Supervision: Niket Tandon, 2010
Master Thesis Supervision: Niket Tandon, 2011

Misc.

Memberships: ACL, ACM, IEEE (-2009), BCS-IRSG, ACL SIGLEX, GWA
Profiles: LinkedIn profile, FOAF file, URI
Programming Languages: Scala, Java, C#, C++, Python, etc.
Other Interests: philosophy of language, epistemology, learning languages
Erdős Number: 3
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