Kilicoglu and students recognized for best system paper at SemEval-2021

Halil Kilicoglu
Halil Kilicoglu, Associate Professor

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."

"Participants were expected to develop NLP models to automatically extract and structure scholarly contributions of publications in the NLP field. The ultimate goal is automatic knowledge curation from the scientific literature to facilitate better information access," said Kilicoglu. "The system we developed combined well-established ideas from Information Extraction with a cascade of neural network models, achieving the top performance at SemEval."

The resulting paper, "UIUC-BioNLP at SemEval-2021 Task 11: A Cascade of Neural Models for Structuring Scholarly NLP Contributions," received the Best System Paper Award out of 175 papers.

Kilicoglu's research interests include biomedical informatics, natural language processing, computational semantics, literature-based knowledge discovery, scholarly communication, science of science, and scientific reproducibility. He holds a PhD in computer science from Concordia University.

Liu's research interests include representation learning in NLP, information retrieval, knowledge engineering, and their applications in the biomedical domain. He earned his bachelor's degree in telecommunications engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

Sarol is interested in using text mining, natural language processing, and network analysis to develop tools that enhance the productivity of researchers. She holds an MS in information management from the University of Illinois and BS in computer science from the University of the Philippines.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Hassan selected for IAPP Westin Scholar Award

PhD student Muhammad Hassan has been selected as an IAPP Westin Scholar Award honoree. The annual awards were created by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to support students who are identified as future leaders in the field of privacy and data protection. 

Muhammad Hassan

Bak defends dissertation

PhD candidate Michelle Bak successfully defended her dissertation, "Promoting a Healthy and Comprehensive Diet through Theory-Driven Large Language Models-based Agents," on July 14.

Chaewon Bak

School welcomes specialized faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of two specialized faculty members. Yildiz Esener and Nitin Verma will join the School as teaching assistant professors in August 2025.

iSchool to present research at the Digital Humanities 2025 conference

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at DH2025, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), which will take place on July 14–18 in Lisbon, Portugal. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. 

Zalot defends dissertation

PhD candidate Andrew Zalot successfully defended his dissertation, "'Tweet of the Town:' Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans," on July 3.

Andrew Zalot