Karel Oliva

Karel Oliva graduated in Computer Science, with specialization in Computational Linguistics, from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in 1983. Between 1983 and 1988, he was a Ph.D. student at the same faculty, however, due to political reasons he was not allowed to defend his Ph.D. thesis (this happened only later, in 1997, at the Faculty of Arts). Because of this, he left Czechoslovakia for Bulgaria illegally in January 1989, and immediately after his arrival to Sofia he started working as a researcher at the Department of mathematical linguistics of the Coordination Centre of Computer Science and Computer Technology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In October 1989 he legalized his stay abroad, and since April 1990 became a member of the staff of the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken (Germany), where he defended his habilitation thesis and was awarded the title of assistant professor („Privatdozent“) i