Joakim Nivre granted the Chester Carlson Research Award

Joakim Nivre. Photo Daniel Olsson

"I am proud and pleased that IVA is granting Joakim Nivre the Chester Carlson Research Award. Joakim Nivre's research has focused on grammatical analysis, which has contributed to the development of language models," says Professor Sylvia Schwaag Serger, President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).

Motivation

Joakim Nivre's innovative contributions to computational linguistics, his leadership in the research community, and his commitment to promoting language technology through collaboration make him a worthy recipient of the Chester Carlson Award. His work not only contributes to academic understanding but also has practical applications for improving language technologies used globally, impacting everything from machine translation to AI-driven communication tools. By granting Nivre the Chester Carlson Award, we recognise his outstanding achievements and the lasting impact his work has had on the field of computational linguistics.

About This Year's Award-winner

Joakim Nivre is a professor of computational linguistics at Uppsala University and a senior researcher at RISE. He holds a PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Gothenburg and a PhD in Computer Science from Växjö University.

His research focuses on using data-driven methods to develop language technology, particularly for analysing grammar and meaning in text. He helped create a method called transition-based dependency parsing, explained in his book Inductive Dependency Parsing (2006). He also co-founded the Universal Dependencies project, which aims to create consistent grammatical annotations for languages worldwide. The project now covers over 160 languages and involves more than 600 researchers globally.

Nivre's contributions to the field are profound and far-reaching. He has produced more than 300 scientific publications, which have had a significant impact on the field of computational linguistics. His work has been recognised with over 25,000 citations according to Google Scholar (as of October 2024). Furthermore, Nivre's leadership and influence are underscored by his status as a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and his tenure as its president in 2017.

Additionally, Nivre has been instrumental in advancing the understanding and application of syntactic and semantic analysis across different languages. His pioneering work with the transition-based parsing model has set a new standard in the field, offering robust and efficient methods for analysing syntactic structure in various languages. The Universal Dependencies project, which Nivre co-founded, has become a cornerstone in computational linguistics, providing a framework for consistent annotation to support multilingual applications of language technology.

Beyond his technical contributions, Nivre has played a key role in fostering a collaborative international research community. His efforts have brought together researchers from around the world, driving collective advancements in language technology. This spirit of collaboration and commitment to open science is reflected in the broad participation and ongoing success of the Universal Dependencies project.