Dr Venelin Kovatchev

Dr Venelin Kovatchev

School of Computer Science
Assistant Professor

Contact details

Address
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr. Venelin Kovatchev is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham and a member of the ELLIS Society. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

He is interested in data-centric NLP and topics such as dynamic evaluation frameworks for NLP, active learning, unit testing for NLP and AI, adversarial attacks, data augmentation and data generation.

His current projects span across problems such as dynamic training and testing for LLMs, training LLM teaching assistants, information extraction from legal and medical documents, natural language understanding, and automatic fact checking.

Before joining UoB in February 2023, Dr. Kovatchev was a postdoc at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from the University of Barcelona where he worked on natural language understanding.

Personal webiste

email: v.o.kovatchev@bham.ac.uk

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Abbas, A, Lee, M, Shanavas, N & Kovatchev, V 2024, 'Clinical concept annotation with contextual word embedding in active transfer learning environment', Digital Health .

Devine, RT, Kovatchev, V, Grumley Traynor, I, Smith, P & Lee, M 2023, 'Machine learning and deep learning systems for automated measurement of ‘advanced’ theory of mind: reliability and validity in children and adolescents', Psychological Assessment, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 165-177. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0001186

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M, Grumley Traynor, I, Luque Aguilera, I & Devine, RT 2020, “What is on your mind?” Automated Scoring of Mindreading in Childhood and Early Adolescence. in D Scott, N Bel & C Zong (eds), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 6217, International Conference on Computational Linguistics , Barcelona, Spain, 8/12/20. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.547

Conference contribution

Abbas, A, Lee, M, Kovatchev, V & Shanavas, N 2025, MTNER: Multiple Tender Named Entities Recognition and Classification from unstructured tender documents. in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication. IEEE Press / Wiley, International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, Bangkok, Thailand, 3/01/25.

Kovatchev, V & Dsouza, R 2025, Sources of Disagreement in Data for LLM Instruction Tuning. in CoMeDi: Context and Meaning - Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotations. CoMeDi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 19/01/25.

Kovatchev, V & Lease, M 2024, Benchmark Transparency: Measuring the Impact of Data on Evaluation. in K Duh, H Gomez & S Bethard (eds), Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 1536–1551, 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, NAACL 2024, Mexico City, Mexico, 16/06/24. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.86

Abbas, A, Lee, M, Shanavas, N, Kovatchev, V & Ali, M 2024, Structured Tender Entities Extraction from Complex Tables with Few-short Learning. in COLING 2025 Proceedings of the Workshop on Regulatory Natural Language Processing (REGNLP 2025) . Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, Regulatory Natural Language Processing Workshop (RegNLP) 2025, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 20/01/25.

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021, Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability. in C Zong, F Xia, W Li & R Navigli (eds), Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). vol. 1, International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 1196-1206, Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, Virtual, Online, 1/08/21. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.96

Preprint

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021 'Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability' arXiv, pp. 1-11. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01635v1>

View all publications in research portal