Alexander Popov is a computational linguist who also works in the broad field of science fiction studies. He obtained his PhD in Informatics from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, with a dissertation on the topic of lexical modeling in the context of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. He has worked on projects in the fields of machine translation, automatic information extraction, knowledge representation and digital reading. He studies literary texts mainly from the theoretical and methodological lenses of utopian studies, ecocriticism and posthumanism, and is also particularly interested in the language of science fiction – from a cognitive and literary-theoretic point of view. Alexander Popov is a long-time editor and author at “ShadowDance” – the oldest media outlet in Bulgaria dedicated to the speculative arts. He teaches science fiction at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.”
Selected publications:
- Popov, Alexander and Konstantin Georgiev. “Crises of Water and the New Maps to Utopia.” Paradoxa 31, 2020 (forthcoming).
- Popov, Alexander. “Rewriting Myth and Genre Boundaries: Narrative Modalities in The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan.” Fantastika Journal 4(1), 114-128, 2020.
- Popov, Alexander. “The Utopian Hyperobject: Revolutionary Topologies in Science Fiction.” New Forms of Space and Spatiality in Science Fiction, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1-15, 2019.
- Popov, Alexander, and Jennifer Sikos. “Graph Embeddings for Frame Identification.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), 940-949, 2019.
- Popov, Alexander, Kiril Simov and Petya Osenova. “Know Your Graph. State-of-the-Art Knowledge-Based WSD.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), 950-959, 2019.