Nikolay Paev
2026
Towards a Bulgarian Historical Newspaper Corpus – Construction of Reading Order over the Text in Searchable PDFs
Nikolay Paev | Stefan Marinov | Ivan Kratchanov | Petya Osenova | Kiril Simov
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers
Nikolay Paev | Stefan Marinov | Ivan Kratchanov | Petya Osenova | Kiril Simov
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers
The determine the reading order of the text extracted from a searchable PDF produced by an OCR software from an old newspaper is the first task in the process of preparation of corpora of old newspapers. In the paper we present an algorithm for generation of reading order of black selected from the corresponding PDF. Also we performed a tuning of the parameters of the algorithm. The optimization provides 10 % improvement.
Is Human–LLM Interaction Culture-Dependent? A Cross-Linguistic NLP Analysis of Student Interviews on AI-Assisted Thesis Writing
Madalina Chitez | Karla Csuros | Dejana Jelena Milićević | Petya Osenova | Stefan Marinov | Teodor Valchev | Nikolay Paev | Otto Kruse | Christian Rapp | Andreea Dinca | Roxana Rogobete | Claudia Doroholschi | Loredana Punga | Anabella Costache | Dumitru Tucan | Cristina Baniceru
Proceedings of Shaping Multilingual, Multimodal AI for the Social Sciences and Humanities (LLMs4SSH) @ LREC 2026
Madalina Chitez | Karla Csuros | Dejana Jelena Milićević | Petya Osenova | Stefan Marinov | Teodor Valchev | Nikolay Paev | Otto Kruse | Christian Rapp | Andreea Dinca | Roxana Rogobete | Claudia Doroholschi | Loredana Punga | Anabella Costache | Dumitru Tucan | Cristina Baniceru
Proceedings of Shaping Multilingual, Multimodal AI for the Social Sciences and Humanities (LLMs4SSH) @ LREC 2026
This study investigates whether human–LLM interaction in academic writing exhibits cross-cultural variation. Using NLP-informed corpus methods, we analyze nine semi-structured student interviews from three national contexts (Romania, Bulgaria, Switzerland) to examine how AI use is linguistically constructed across three dimensions of epistemic positioning: agency strength, authority dynamics, and discourse-level stance. Results show a strong predominance of distancing and hedging strategies, with AI consistently framed as a functional writing support tool rather than an epistemic authority. At the same time, modest but systematic cross-country differences indicate culturally embedded variation in how students discursively negotiate epistemic responsibility and evaluation in AI-assisted writing practices.
Small Can Be Beautiful in LLMs for SSH: a Case for Bulgarian
Kiril Simov | Nikolay Paev | Petya Osenova | Teodor Valchev | Stefan Marinov
Proceedings of Shaping Multilingual, Multimodal AI for the Social Sciences and Humanities (LLMs4SSH) @ LREC 2026
Kiril Simov | Nikolay Paev | Petya Osenova | Teodor Valchev | Stefan Marinov
Proceedings of Shaping Multilingual, Multimodal AI for the Social Sciences and Humanities (LLMs4SSH) @ LREC 2026
In the paper we present a set of small LLM-based models for solving the basic NLP tasks for Bulgarian - POS tagging, Lemmatization, Dependency parsing, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Linking, Event Annotation, among others. In order to create fine-tuned models for these tasks, we first pre-train models using architectures like BERT, Modern-BERT, and T5 with different sizes, over Bulgarian data only. For each of the tasks we report our approach towards the fine-tuning, the results from the experiments and also the evaluation. Then we define a way to visualize the results over HTML documents which contain the analyzed texts. Our rationale are as follows: most, if not all SSH research scenarios, need a reliable processing chains that can be customized with respect to the specific needs. These scenarios also would need proper visualization for human observation. We aim to provide such a basic LLM-based toolkit.
2025
Visualization of LLM Annotated Documents
Teodor Todorov Valtchev | Nikolay Paev
Proceedings of the 9th Student Research Workshop associated with the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Teodor Todorov Valtchev | Nikolay Paev
Proceedings of the 9th Student Research Workshop associated with the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
The paper presents an automatic annotation and visualization system for documents in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities. The annotation is on two levels, named Entities and Events. The system combines automatically generated annotations from language models with a powerful text editor that is extended to accommodate manual annotation. The goal is to support the extraction of information from historical documents by scientists in the SS&H field. At the time of writing of the paper, the system is still in development.
Bulgarian Event Extraction with LLMs
Kiril Simov | Nikolay Paev | Petya Osenova | Stefan Marinov
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Kiril Simov | Nikolay Paev | Petya Osenova | Stefan Marinov
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
The paper presents the results from the experiments with two large language models (LLMs) - T5 and Llama – for extracting events from a Bulgarian event corpus. The two models were pretrained by us on 35 Billion Token Bulgarian Corpus. The extraction was performed within the context of one sentence. Our approach aims at balancing the ACE-oriented approach that uses triggers in event detection, and the MUC-oriented one that uses more general event types. The evaluation relies on the IoU (Intersection over Union) of token spans and is twofold. The first one refers to the predicted event token span. Here if the span is correct, the semantic roles within the event are further checked. The second one refers to the triple of an event type, its semantic roles and participants. The results are promising. A qualitative evaluation is provided as well.
Word Sense Disambiguation with Large Language Models: Casing Bulgarian
Nikolay Paev | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova
Proceedings of the 13th Global Wordnet Conference
Nikolay Paev | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova
Proceedings of the 13th Global Wordnet Conference
2024
Introducing Shallow Syntactic Information within the Graph-based Dependency Parsing
Nikolay Paev | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova
Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2024)
Nikolay Paev | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova
Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2024)
The paper presents a new BERT model, fine-tuned for parsing of Bulgarian texts. This model is extended with a new neural network layer in order to incorporate shallow syntactic information during the training phase. The results show statistically significant improvement over the baseline. Thus, the addition of syntactic knowledge - even partial - makes the model better. Also, some error analysis has been conducted on the results from the parsers. Although the architecture has been designed and tested for Bulgarian, it is also scalable for other languages. This scalability was shown here with some experiments and evaluation on an English treebank with a comparable size.