Plenary speakers
fgonza@ual.es
Francisco Gonzálvez-García is Full Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Philology at the University of Almería (Spain). He graduated in English Philology at the University of Granada (Spain) in 1993. After obtaining a scholarship from the Fundación Cardenal Albornoz by means of a national merit competition in 1994, he obtained a second degree in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Bologna (Italy) and a PhD from the Universities of Bologna, Granada, Oxford and Cambridge in 1996 with the highest mark (‘110 e lode’) and a special mention (‘dignità di stampa’). He has taught English Linguistics at the University of Almería since 1997, when he was appointed adjunct professor. He became tenured senior lecturer in 2001, and full professor in 2018. He has taught master's/doctoral courses in Cognitive Linguistics as a guest professor at the Universities of Huelva, Jaén, Córdoba, Santiago de Compostela, La Rioja, the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Alcalá de Henares. He has also been an invited speaker at the universities of La Rioja (Spain), Pavia (Italy), Austin (USA), Houston (USA), Oviedo (Spain), La Laguna (Spain), Czestochowa (Poland), Ekaterimburg (Russia), Cádiz (Spain) and Alcalá de Henares (Spain), among others.
Among his main lines of research are the semantic-syntax interface, functional-cognitive space, Construction Grammar (s), Contrastive Linguistics (English-Spanish), and the pedagogical potential of usage-based, constructionist approaches to language. He is the author (together with Prof. C. S. Butler) of Exploring Functional-Cognitive Space (2014, John Benjamins), which received the 2016 Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics in the Senior Scholar modality. He has edited or co-edited 5 collective volumes and published more than 70 research contributions to several edited volumes and journals. He is a member of the editorial board of Functions of Language and Cognitive Semantics, and a member of the permanent scientific committee of the Spanish Association of Cognitive Linguistics (AELCO/SCOLA). He also serves as a member of the scientific committee of journals such as Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Constructions, Borealis as well as the International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL), among others. Over the period 2020-2024 he has been a member of the Nominating Committee of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE). From 2020, he is also part of the executive board of AELCO/SCOLA as secretary of the association.
maite@ujaen.es
M. Teresa Martín-Valdivia is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Jaén. From November 2017 to April 2019 she was Director of the Research Office of the University of Jaén. From April 2019 to November 2022 she was Vice-Rector of Digital University of the University of Jaén. Since November 2021 she is a member of the advisory board of the Andalusian Digital Agency (ADA) having participated in the design of the Artificial Intelligence strategy for Andalusia. Currently, since 1st of November 2022 she is research manager in the ICT panel for the State Research Agency. In addition, since May 2023 she has been a member of the SCIE Women in Computer Science Committee. Finally, since October 2023 she has been a member of the ANECA's Computer Science Committee for the accreditation of university teaching staff.
She belongs to the SINAI (Sistemas INteligentes de Acceso a la Información) research group since its creation in 2001, a reference group in Natural Language Processing (NLP) both nationally and internationally. Currently, her main lines of research are focused on the study and development of NLP systems applied to biomedicine and, on the other hand, in systems based on sentiment and emotion analysis for social purposes such as hate speech detection systems, detection of mental health problems (anorexia, depression, suicide...) or detection of offensive language as well as the generation and integration of linguistic resources that allow the adaptation to Spanish to improve this type of systems.
From 2007 to 2019 she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN) as Treasurer. She has been editor of the journal ‘Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural’ for 12 years and is the author of more than 200 scientific publications. She is a technical reviewer for several journals and a member of the Programme Committee of several prestigious conferences. She has directed and participated in more than 20 scientific projects both national and international, with special emphasis on the European project FIRST (Flexible Interactive Reading Support Tool) in which she was the PI of the team from the University of Jaén. She is currently PI of 3 national projects and leads 2 transfer contracts, one of them with the Ministry of the Interior through the National Office for the Fight against Hate Crimes (ONDOD) where she is working on the automatic generation of counter-narratives using language models and with highly competitive results. She is also a founding partner of the University of Jaén spin-off YottaCode SL created in 2016 with the aim of developing therapeutic software in the field of cognitive language disorders based on NLP.
Professor Martín is also very committed to the dissemination and promotion of computer science, especially among women, which is why she is regularly involved in giving lectures in schools, high schools and other organisations to promote computer science in general and NLP in particular, mainly aimed at girls and women. As a result of this involvement, she created on 8 March 2020 the community ‘DiverTLes: Diversity in Language Technologies in Spain' (DiverTLes: Diversidad en Tecnologías del Lenguaje en España) made up of more than 150 women working and researching in NLP and which focuses on organising promotional and dissemination activities to make the role of women in this field more visible. It also leads projects such as GeMeCo to visualise gender gaps in digital media and participates in initiatives such as InspiraSTEAM and the European GEM project to empower girls in the digital sphere.
c.j.forceville@uva.nl
Charles Forceville is associate professor in the Film/Media Studies department of Universiteit van Amsterdam, NL. The key theme in his research is the question how visuals, alone or in combination with other modes, convey meaning. Committed to cognitivist and relevance-theoretic approaches, he writes on multimodality in various genres and media (documentary, animation, fiction film, advertising, comics, cartoons, pictograms and traffic signs, pictures in children’s books). He published Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (Routledge, 1996). With Eduardo Urios-Aparisi he edited Multimodal Metaphor (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009); with Tony Veale and Kurt Feyaerts Creativity and the Agile Mind (Mouton de Gruyter, 2013); and with Assimakis Tseronis Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres (Benjamins, 2017). His monograph Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle appeared in 2020 (Oxford University Press).
Under his guidance, students of HKU Utrecht made a series of five short animation film on narratology (and one on the JOURNEY metaphor), available on YouTube (2014-2019). Forceville has profiles on Researchgate.net and Academia.edu.