Computer Science System

CURRICULUM VITAE

of

Saba Amsalu Teserra

a. CONTACT INFORMATION

Address : **** ***** **. ** ******* GA 30318 (I am in France this summer - can be

reached by email)

Cell phone : 1-404-***-****

Email : ******@****.******.***

b. EDUCATION

• PhD. in Computational Linguistics, Bielefeld University (Germany), April 2004 – June 2007

- Dissertation Title : Bilingual word and chunk alignment: a hybrid system for

- Grade: summa cum laude (with highest honor)

- Award: Dissertation award of the Westfaelisch-Lippische Universitaetsgesellschaft

2007.

Oral exam topics:

- Pattern recognition approach of word alignment,

- Stochastic POS Tagging (Conditional Random Fields and Markov Random Fields),

- Spelling-checker for non-standard languages.

• MSc. in Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Faculty of Informatics, August 2001

- Thesis title: The Application of Information Retrieval Techniques to Amharic Documents on the

Web [Grade: Excellent]

c. CURRENT ACTIVITIES

Drupal consultant: SG.org (April 2011-)

•

Expertise- database design (fully normalized database design and documentation in UML). Proficient in SQL

database management, HTML(XHTML), CSS, Java script and PHP.

d. ACADEMIC JOBS

• Mobility Grant by the Academy of Finland (# 129127): Collaborated with Dr. Anssi

Yli-Jyra on SMT of Amharic, 2008-2009.

Guest Professor, University of Gondar, Dep. of Computer Science, 2008.

Visiting Professor, Georgia Tech., School of Mathematics, 2007-2008.

Lecturer, Addis Ababa University, Faculty of Informatics, 2001 – 2004

e. SUMMER SCHOOL AND TUTORIAL

1. 17th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2005),

Tutorial: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP - 2005), Borovets,

f. LANGUAGE SKILLS

Amharic, English, German, French

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g. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

1. Software Tools Developed

a) A system that aligns parallel text (Model I & Model II (Platform: C

Finite - State Morphological Analyzer for Amharic, including evaluation software (Platform: XFST).

Miscellaneous - Concordance generator, Font converter, etc. (Platform: Linux shell and C

Payroll system study and design: Addis Ababa University -(as coordinator and system analyst).

Class Scheduling System: Addis Ababa University - (as a programmer).

2. Proficiency in Programming Languages:

a) Low level: C, C++

Scripting: Perl, Java, Visual Basic and Linux Shell, PHP, Java script

Markup: XML(including DTD, XML Schema design and XSLT), HTML

h. PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIENCE

1. Teaching

- University of Gondar: Courses to Computer Science students, graduating class

a) Scripting in XML: DTDs, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, Summer 2008

b) Introduction to Scripting in Perl, Summer 2008

- Georgia Tech.: Introduction to Probability and Statistics, Math 3215, Fall 2007

- Bielefeld University: Verfahren der Verarbeitung sprachlichen Wissens (Methods of Processing

Language based Knowledge), Summer 2006

- Addis Ababa University: Courses to Master and Bachelor students in Informatics:

a) Modern Information Storage and Retrieval, 50 students, Fall & Spring 2001/02/03,

Information Systems Analysis and Design, 100 x 2 students, Fall & Spring 2002/03,

Programming in C, C++, Visual Basic, 100 x 4 students, Fall & Spring 2001/02/03,

Data structures and Algorithm Analysis, 30 students, Fall 2004

Information Theory, 30 students, Fall 2002/03

Statistical Data Analysis (SPSS), 30 students, Spring 2003

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, 100 x 4 students, Fall 2004.

2. Supervision of Master Thesis on:

a) Application of Case-Based Reasoning for Amharic Legal Precedent Retrieval: A Case

N-gram Based Automatic Indexing for Amharic Text (Bethlehem Mengistu), 2002.

Text Retrieval Using Self-Organized Map: The case of ILRI Digital Library (Mulugeta Bayeh), 2002.

Amharic Text Retrieval: An experiment Using Latent Semantic Indexing with Singular

Application of WEBSOM to Amharic Text Retrieval (Bizuneh MMamuye), 2003.

Supervision of Final year Bachelor of Information System Studies: Mostly projects of Software development

for Business - such as sales management, payroll, inventory control systems, etc.

i. PUBLICATIONS

1. Dieter Metzing and Saba Amsalu Teserra, Conjunctive coordination in Amharic: some

S. Amsalu, H. Matzinger and M. Vachkovskaia, Thermodynamical Approach to the Longest

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Common Subsequence Problem, in Journal of Statistical Physics (2008), Vol. 131, No.6.

S. Amsalu, S. Popov and H. Matzinger, Macroscopic non-uniqueness and transversal fluctuation in optimal

random sequence alignment, in ESAIM: P&S (2007), Vol. 11, pp. 281-300.

Teserra, Saba Amsalu, Bilingual word and chunk alignment : a hybrid system for Amharic

2007.

Saba Amsalu, Scaling up from word to phrasal alignments of Amharic-English parallel corpora, In

proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Bilingualism, Joensuu, (2006).

Saba Amsalu, Maximum Likelihood Alignment of Translation Equivalents, In proceedings of the 5th

International Conference on Natural Language Processing, Turku, (2006).

Saba Amsalu and Girma A. Demeke, Induction of Amharic Verb Stem lexicon for Finite-

State Morphological Analysis, In proceedings of World Congress of African Linguistics,

Addis Ababa, (2006).

Saba Amsalu and Girma A. Demeke, Non-concatenative Finite-state Morphotactics of Amharic Simple

Verbs, In Journal of Ethiopian Language Studies (2006).

Saba Amsalu and Sisay Fissaha Adafre, Machine Translation for Amharic, where we are,

SALTMIL, Genoa, (2006).

Saba Amsalu, Data-driven Amharic-English Bilingual Lexicon Acquisition, In proceedings LREC, Genoa,

(2006).

Saba Amsalu and Dafydd Gibbon, Methods of Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Amharic- English Parallel

Corpora, In proceedings of World Congress of African Linguistics, Addis

Ababa, (2006).

2. Saba Amsalu and Dafydd Gibbon, A complete FS model for Amharic morphographemics,

3. Saba Amsalu and Dafydd Gibbon, Finite state morphology of Amharic, Proceedings of 47 – 51.

Saba Amsalu, The Application of Information Retrieval Techniques to Amharic Documents in the Web,

Master Thesis, Department of Information Science, Addis Ababa

University, (2001).

In preparation

1. Saba Amsalu, Towards a Deterministic Finite-state Tokenizer for Amharic, submitted,

(2010).

S. Amsalu, C. Houdre, H. Matzinger, Dispersion of the LCS for a sparse contamination model, (2010)

j. TALKS

1. On Amharic Spell-checker, University of Gondar, Dep. of Computer Science, (June 2008).

Constructing a spelling-checker where there is no standard spelling: The case of Amharic, ACAL/ALTA,

Florida, (March 2007).

A Hybrid Word Alignment System, Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, (January 2007).

Data-driven Amharic-English Bilingual Lexicon Acquisition, LREC, Italy, (May 2006).

Maximum Likelihood Alignment of Translation Equivalents, The 5th International Conference on Natural

Language Processing, Turku, (August 2006).

Scaling up from word to phrasal alignments of Amharic-English parallel corpora, The 9th Nordic Conference

on Bilingualism, Joensuu, (August 2006).

Induction of Amharic Verb Stem lexicon for Finite-State Morphological Analysis, World Congress of

African Linguistics, Addis Ababa, (August 2006).

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Methods of Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Amharic-English Parallel Corpora, World Congress of

African Linguistics, Addis Ababa, (August 2006).

k. RECENTLY REVIEWED PAPERS

1. Part-of-Speech Tagging of Amharic, for the journal of Language Resources and Evaluation (2010)

A Morphological Processor for Amharic and Tigrinya, for the journal of Language Resources and Evaluation

(2010)

Finite State Morphology of the Nguni Language Cluster: Modeling and Implementation Issues, for FSMNLP

(2009)

Automatic training of lemmatization rules that handle morphological changes in prefixes and suffixes alike,

for EACL (March 30 - April 3, 2009

Arabic finite-state morphological processing, for EACL (March 30 - April 3, 2009)

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