Rate My Professor Serge Sharoff

Serge Sharoff is Professor of Language Technology in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, specializing in computational linguistics within the broader field of Linguistics. He earned his PhD in 1997 from Moscow Lomonosov State University, with a thesis on Natural Language Processing tools for Information Extraction. Following his doctorate, he held a postdoctoral appointment at the Russian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 1997 to 2000 and a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, from 2001 to 2002. Sharoff joined the University of Leeds in 2003, where his research intersects linguistics—primarily computational linguistics and corpus linguistics—cognitive science, and communication studies informed by Systemic-Functional Linguistics.

Sharoff's academic interests center on language technology, natural language processing, machine translation, corpus linguistics, digital humanities, genres and text classification, terminology mining, related languages, and Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. He has developed vast multilingual corpora collected automatically from the web for Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, annotated for genres, domains, and morphosyntactic categories. Key publications include the book Building and Using Comparable Corpora for Multilingual Natural Language Processing (2023); Genre Annotation for the Web: text-external and text-internal perspectives (Register Studies, 2021); Functional text dimensions for the annotation of Web corpora (Corpora, 13(1):65–95, 2018); Finding next of kin: Cross-lingual embedding spaces for related languages (Natural Language Engineering, 25, 2019); and Sentence Level Human Translation Quality Estimation with Attention-based Neural Networks (LREC, 2020, with Yu Yuan). His work has amassed 4,964 citations on Google Scholar, including citation by OpenAI GPT creators for his analysis of web text diversity. Sharoff contributes to the ASSIST project on translation equivalents using comparable corpora and co-organizes BUCC workshops on the topic.