Lucia Specia is a British computer scientist, professor of natural language processing at Imperial College London and Chief Scientist at Contex.ai. She holds a joint position in language engineering at the University of Sheffield. Her research investigates data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP).
Early life and education
Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes [pt] from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC).
Research and career
After earning her PhD, Specia moved to Xerox Research Centre Europe, where she worked as a research engineer. In 2010 Specia joined the University of Wolverhampton as a senior lecturer. She moved to the University of Sheffield in 2012, and Imperial College London in 2018. She took up a joint appointment at the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.
Specia specialises in natural language processing using multi-modal input data, quality estimations in machine learning and the intersection of language and vision. She developed QuEst, an open source software tool used for quality estimation for machine translation. Specia was awarded an Amazon Research Award in 2016, using which she investigated the quality of machine translation for product reviews. In 2016 Specia was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to use multi-modal information as an input for machine learning algorithms.
Select publications
- Daniel Cer; Mona Diab; Eneko Agirre; Iñigo Lopez-Gazpio; Lucia Specia (31 July 2017). "SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation" (PDF). Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017). Proceedings of the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation. arXiv:1708.00055. doi:10.18653/V1/S17-2001. Wikidata Q57265540.
- Ondrej Bojar; Christian Buck; Christian Federmann; et al. (2014), Findings of the 2014 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, doi:10.3115/V1/W14-3302, Wikidata Q64060701
- Desmond Elliott; Stella Frank; Khalil Sima'an; Lucia Specia (2 May 2016), Multi30K: Multilingual English-German Image Descriptions (PDF), arXiv:1605.00459, Wikidata Q63171161
References
- "Our team". contex.ai.
- Lucia Specia publications indexed by Google Scholar
- Lucia Specia publications from Europe PubMed Central
- Lucia Specia at DBLP Bibliography Server
- ^ "Lucia Specia: Lecturer in Computer Science and a member of the Natural Language Processing group". shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2012-11-15.
- Lucia Specia publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
- Lucia Specia on Twitter
- Lucia Specia on LinkedIn
- Specia, Lucia (2007). A hybrid relational approach for word sense disambiguation in machine translation (PhD thesis). doi:10.11606/T.55.2007.tde-05122007-205308. OCLC 691635829.
- ^ "Propor 2010 | International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language". inf.pucrs.br. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- "Lucia Specia". khipu.ai. 2019-08-08. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- "DCU and ADAPT appoint world leading expert in natural language processing". dcu.ie. Dublin City University. 2020-04-17. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- "QuEst++". staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- "Lucia Specia". amazon.science. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
- "Multi-modal Context Modelling for Machine Translation | MultiMT Project | Fact Sheet | H2020". europa.eu. European Commission. Retrieved 2023-11-23.
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