Curriculum Vitae

• I am currently a research scholar 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 months at the Machine Learning and Perception Group (headed by Christopher Bishop) at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with Thore Graepel and Gjergji Kasneci.
  
  
• Citizenship: German

Current Research Foci

The vision driving my research is the idea that there is now so much digital data out there that machines should be able to better make sense of human language, make sense of the world, and hence better serve our needs. By smartly drawing on various sorts of knowledge available on the Web as well as statistical learning methods, we can produce systems that improve our daily life, e.g. through better web search, data organization, and multilingual support. More specifically, my research interests include: Data Mining, Graph Algorithms, and Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing Big Data Approaches to Web and Text Mining Data Integration, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Technologies Multilingual and cross-lingual natural language processing

Awards and Recognition

• Best Paper Award (out of 945 full paper submissions)
  19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010) [certificate]
  
  
• Best Paper Award
  International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources (ICGL 2008) [picture]
  
  
• Best Demonstration Award (with Johannes Hoffart, Fabian Suchanek, Klaus Berberich, Edwin Lewis-Kelham, Gerhard Weikum)
  20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011)
  
  
• Nominee for Best German/Swiss/Austrian Computer Science Dissertation 2010 (GI-Dissertationspreis 2010)
  
  
• Dr. Eduard Martin Prize
  awarded for best Saarland University dissertations across all disciplines
  
  
• Best Reviewer Award
  PIKM 2012 (5th Workshop for Ph.D. Students at ACM CIKM 2012) [certificate]
  
  
• Scholarship (Doctoral Studies): 2007-2010
  IMPRS-CS
  
  
• Scholarship (Foreign Studies): 2004-2005, Université de Montréal, Canada
  German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
  
  
• Scholarship (Merit): 2003-2006
  German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
  
  
• Scholarship (Online Scholarship): alumnus
  e-fellows.net
  
  

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)

Publications

• Not Quite the Same: Identity Constraints for the Web of Linked Data  
  Gerard de Melo (2013, to appear)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2013.
  
  
• Good, Great, Excellent: Global Inference of Semantic Intensities  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Mohit Bansal (2013, to appear)
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL.
  
  
• Searching the Web of Data (Tutorial Abstract)  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Katja Hose (2013, to appear)
  In: Proc. ECIR 2013. Springer LNCS.
  
  
• Taxonomic Data Integration from Multilingual Wikipedia Editions   
  Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (accepted)
  Knowledge and Information Systems, Springer.
  Impact Factor: 2.225
  
  
• Markov Chains for Robust Graph-based Commonsense Information Extraction (Demonstration Paper)  
  Niket Tandon, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Gerard de Melo
  In: Proc. COLING 2012.
  
  
• OpenWordNet-PT: An Open Brazilian WordNet for Reasoning (Demonstration Paper)  
  Valeria de Paiva, Alexandre Rademaker, Gerard de Melo
  In: Proc. COLING 2012.
  
  
• Exploiting Web Data Sources for Advanced NLP   BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo
  In: Proc. COLING 2012 Tutorial Notes.
  
  
• LINDA: Distributed Web-of-Data-Scale Entity Matching (Short Paper)   BibTeX
  Christoph Böhm, Gerard de Melo, Felix Naumann, Gerhard Weikum (2012)
  In: Proc. CIKM 2012.
  Acceptance rate: 27.8%.
  
  
• Constructing and Utilizing Wordnets using Statistical Methods   BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2012)
  Journal Language Resources and Evaluation 46:2, p. 287-311, Springer Verlag, Dordrecht, Netherlands.
  
  
• Source-Path-Goal: Investigating the Cross-Linguistic Potential of Frame-Semantic Text Analysis    BibTeX
  Oliver Čulo, Gerard de Melo (2012)
  it - Information Technology 54(3), Oldenbourg.
  
  
• UWN: A Large Multilingual Lexical Knowledge Base (Demonstration Paper)   PDF    BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2012)
  In: Proc. ACL 2012.
  
  
• Empirical Comparisons of MASC Word Sense Annotations   PDF    BibTeX   Blog
  Gerard de Melo, Collin F. Baker, Nancy Ide, Rebecca Passonneau, Christiane Fellbaum (2012)
  In: Proc. LREC 2012. ELRA.
  
  
• Precedes: A Semantic Relation in FrameNet   PDF    BibTeX
  Miriam R.L. Petruck, Gerard de Melo (2012)
  In: Proc. LREC 2012 Workshop on Language Resources for Public Security Applications.
  
  
• Graph-based Methods for Large-Scale Multilingual Knowledge Integration  Order online   Order via Amazon   BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo (2012)
  universaar - Saarland University Press, Saarbrücken, Germany. 192 pages. ISBN 978-3-86223-028-0.
  (Book version of doctoral dissertation)
  
  
• 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.
  Acceptance rate: 25%.
  
  
• Graphenbasierte Methoden zur multilingualen Wissensintegration   BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo (2011)
  In: Ausgezeichnete Informatikdissertationen 2010, Gesellschaft für Informatik LNI D-11.
  
  
• An Application: Extending SUMO with Wikipedia (Book Chapter)   BibTeX
  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 (Demonstration 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
  ***Nominee for Best German/Swiss/Austrian Computer Science Dissertation 2010*** (GI-Dissertationspreis 2010)
  
  
• 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.
  Acceptance rate: 25%.
  
  
• 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.
  Acceptance rate: 31.8%.
  
  
• 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 regular paper presentations at conferences and workshops)

• Beyond Information Extraction: Graph Algorithms for Better Knowledge Harvesting
  Google, Mountain View, CA, 2013
  
  
• Beyond Information Extraction: Graph Algorithms for Better Knowledge Harvesting
  Nuance Communications, Sunnyvale, CA, 2013
  
  
• Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of Big Data on the Web
  Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 2013
  
  
• Tapping the Collective Intelligence of the Web
  Invited Speaker at The Creative Web, International Symposium on Computational Creativity as a Web-Service, KAIST, December 2012
  
  
• Data Integration and Reasoning on Real-World Big Data
  SRI International, Menlo Park, October 2012
  
  
• Connecting the Dots: Data Integration for the Web of Data
  Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, October 2012
  
  
• Making Sense of Words and Text in over 100 Languages
  University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2012
  
  
• Multilingual Linked Data & Language Resources
  Panel Member at Dagstuhl Multilingual Semantic Web Workshop, September 2012
  
  
• Untangling the Cross-Lingual Link Structure of Wikipedia
  Invited Talk at ACL 2012 Workshop on Multilingual Modeling, Jeju, South Korea. July 2012
  
  
• 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, Paris/Orsay, France. March 2011
  
  
• Constructing Large-Scale Semantic Knowledge Bases
  Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. November 2009

Professional Activities

• Organization
  • International FrameNet Workshop 2013: Co-organizer (with Lars Borin, Karin Friberg Heppin, Miriam R.L. Petruck)
• Conference Programme Committee Memberships
  • ACM WSDM 2014
  • ECML-PKDD 2013 (Demonstration Track)
  • ACL 2013
  • IJCNLP 2013
  • RANLP 2013
  • *SEM 2013
  • AIRS 2013
  • GSCL 2013
  • ACL 2012
  • WWW 2012
  • ESWC 2012
  • ECML-PKDD 2012 (Demonstration Track)
  • KONVENS 2012 (Area Chair)
  • EMNLP-CoNLL 2012
  • *SEM 2012
  • AIRS 2012
  • CIKM 2011 (Demonstration Track)
  • ACL HLT 2011
  • CLA 2011
• Workshop Programme Committee Memberships
  • WWW 2013 Web of Linked Entities (WoLE 2013) Workshop
  • EMNLP 2013 TextGraphs-8 Workshop
  • NAACL HLT 2013 Workshop on Metaphor in NLP
  • International FrameNet Workshop 2013
  • Workshop on Forensic Text Analytics (Fortan) at European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (EISIC 2013)
  • 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2013) at GL 2013
  • 5th PIKM Workshop (at ACM CIKM 2012)
  • ACL 2012 Workshop on The People’s Web meets NLP
  • DGfS 2012 Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics
  • ISWC 2011 2nd Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web
  • EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties
  • CLA 2010
  • COLING 2010 Workshop on The People’s Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources
  • CLA 2009
• Journal Reviewing
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) (2013)
  • Veredas – Journal of Linguistic Studies (2013)
  • Springer Language Resources and Evaluation (2013)
  • CSLI Publications Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) (2013)
  • Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics (2012)
  • Elsevier Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine (2012)
  • Springer Journal Knowledge and Information Systems (2012)
  • Elsevier Artificial Intelligence Journal (2011)
  • Springer Language Resources and Evaluation (2011)
  • Elsevier Artificial Intelligence Journal (2010)
  • International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management (2010)
• Misc. Reviewing
  • Springer book 'The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Language Resources' (2012)
  • AP-CAP 2009
• Session Chairing
  • International FrameNet Workshop 2013
  • COLING 2012: Named Entity Recognition session
  • 20th IEEE ICTAI 2008: AI Algorithms I session

Teaching

• Tutorial on 'Searching the Web of Data' (co-taught with Katja Hose) at ECIR 2013: Slides (80 MB)
• Tutorial on 'Exploiting Web Data Sources for Advanced NLP' at COLING 2012
• 1-Week Course on 'Text Mining and Natural Language Processing' (co-taught with Valeria de Paiva) at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, November 2011
• Teaching Assistant for Lecture 'Information Retrieval and Data Mining', Saarland University, Winter 2007/08
• Internship Supervision: Niket Tandon, 2010
• Master Thesis Supervision: Niket Tandon, 2011

Open Topics for Theses: Please contact me if you are an interested Berkeley/Bay Area student.

Misc.

• Memberships: ACL, ACM, IEEE, GI, BCS-IRSG, ACL SIGLEX, GWA
• Profiles: LinkedIn profile, FOAF file, URI
• Programming Languages: Scala, Java, C#, C++, Python, etc.
• Other Interests:
  • philosophy of language (LinkedIn group, general LinkedIn group)
  • metaphysics
  • epistemology (LinkedIn group)
  • learning languages
  • philosophy of mind (LinkedIn group)
• Erdős Number: 3
• Please support: Kiva social lending