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Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Member

1. Academic Summary



Pushpak Bhattacharyya was a distinguished Indian computer scientist and academic leader, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in India, with significant contributions to machine translation, lexical resources, Indian language computing, and computational linguistics. 


He led the Centre for Indian Language Technology (CFILT) NLP research group at IIT Bombay and served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (2016–2017). 


2. Education


  • B.Tech. (Computer Science) — IIT Kharagpur (1984) 

  • M.Tech. (Computer Science) — IIT Kanpur (1986) 

  • Ph.D. (Computer Science) — IIT Bombay (1994) 



3. Professional Appointments


  • Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay 

  • Director, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (2015–2021) 

  • President, Association for Computational Linguistics (2016–2017) (Past) 

  • Held visiting positions and collaborations at MIT, Stanford University, University Joseph Fourier (France), and University of Texas at Houston. 



4. Research Interests



Pushpak Bhattacharyya’s research spanned core areas of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, including:

  • Machine Translation & Multilingual NLP

  • Lexical Semantics and Wordnets (e.g., IndoWordNet)

  • Word-Sense Disambiguation

  • Sentiment Analysis & Psycholinguistics

  • Information Retrieval & Cross-Lingual IR 



5. Scholarly Output & Impact


  • Authored/co-authored 350+ research papers in top journals and international conferences. 

  • Supervised 300+ undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students. 

  • Google Scholar citations: 20,000+ (as of latest snapshot). 



His authored books include Machine Translation (CRC Press) and further works on computational linguistics and NLP. 


6. Honors & Awards


  • Fellow, Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) 

  • Abdul Kalam National Fellow 

  • Major Bhagat Singh Rekhi Chair Professorship, IIT Bombay 

  • Multiple teaching and research excellence awards including Patwardhan and VNMM Awards. 



7. Leadership & Service



Professor Bhattacharyya played influential roles, including:

  • Chair, AI Standardization Committee, Government of India 

  • Editorial positions in journals like Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge Univ. Press) and AI Magazine (AAAI Press)