PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Slav Petrov

Also known as Slav Orlinov Petrov

Slav Petrov is a natural language processing researcher who helped build tools for multilingual parsing and contributed to large language models. He earned a UC Berkeley PhD in 2009, helped develop shared part-of-speech and dependency resources, and coauthored work on SyntaxNet and PaLM. The ACL recognized his work with a 2014 John Atanasoff Award and a 2023 Test-of-Time Award for his 2013 dependency-annotation paper. As of October 2026, he is vice president of research at Google DeepMind and co-leads Gemini post-training.

Timeline

  1. 2009

    A Berkeley NLP doctorate

    He completes his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009 with the dissertation Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing.

  2. 2012

    Universal part-of-speech tags

    In 2012, he coauthors A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset with Dipanjan Das and Ryan McDonald; the paper maps treebank labels into a shared set used across 22 languages.

  3. 2013

    Multilingual dependency annotation

    In 2013, he coauthors Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing with twelve other researchers.

  4. 2014

    A Bulgarian research award

    He receives the 2014 John Atanasoff Award from Bulgaria's president.

  5. 2017

    A baseline parser for CoNLL

    In 2017, he coauthors the CoNLL shared-task report on ParseySaurus, a dependency parser that beats Parsey's Cousins by 3.47% absolute labeled accuracy across 52 Universal Dependencies treebanks.

  6. 2022

    PaLM and Pathways

    In 2022, he coauthors the PaLM paper, which describes a 540-billion-parameter model trained with Pathways and reports results on language, reasoning, code, and multilingual tasks.

  7. 2023

    An ACL Test-of-Time Award

    The ACL gives its 10-Year Test of Time Paper Award to his 2013 coauthored paper in 2023.

  8. As of October 2026

    Leading Gemini post-training

    As of October 2026, he is vice president of research at Google DeepMind and co-leads post-training for Gemini across audio, multilinguality, and tool use.

Sources and credits

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  1. Ph.D. Dissertations | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing research.google. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. Slav Petrov research.google. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. SyntaxNet Models for the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways research.google. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Köpfe des AI Centers blog.google. Checked 15 October 2026.