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Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP).

Education

Lapata obtained a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. Lapata's doctoral research investigated the acquisition of information from polysemous linguistic units using probabilistic methods supervised by Alex Lascarides, Chris Brew and Steve Finch.

Career and research

After her doctorate, Lapata assumed academic positions at Saarland University and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. At the University of Edinburgh she became a reader in the School of Informatics where she is a full Professor and holds a personal chair in natural language processing. Lapata is a member of the Human Communication Research Center and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, both in Edinburgh.

Between 2015 and 2017, Lapata served as a member of the Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group. Recently Lapata was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth €1.9M to fund five years of her project, TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text.

Awards and honors

• In 2009 Lapata became the first recipient of the Microsoft British Computer Society (BCS)/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award. The award recognizes achievement in furthering the progress in information retrieval and natural language processing; the award commemorates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones.
• In 2012 Lapata won an Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-CoNLL 2012 Best Reviewer Award.
• In 2018 Lapata was awarded, alongside Li Dong, an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Best Paper Honorable Mention.
• In 2019 Lapata was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
• In 2020 Lapata was elected to the Academia Europaea.

References

1. ^ Mirella Lapata publications indexed by Google Scholar
2. ^ Lapata, Maria (2000). The acquisition and modelling of lexical knowledge : a corpus-based investigation of systematic polysemy. lib.ed.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/22394. OCLC 1063499316. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.653681.
3. "people". edinburghnlp.inf.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
4. ^ "Stadium Speaker". stadium.open.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
5. "Image and Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval" (PDF). irsg.bcs.org. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
6. Anon. "Mirella Lapata". www.inf.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
7. Mitchell, Jeff; Lapata, Mirella (2010). "Composition in Distributional Models of Semantics". Cognitive Science. 34 (8): 1388–1429. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01106.x. hdl:1842/4927. ISSN 0364-0213. PMID 21564253. S2CID 26901423.
8. "Mirella Lapata". royalsociety.org. Royal Society. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
9. "TransModal success". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
10. "KSJ Award". irsg.bcs.org. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
11. "EMNLP-CoNLL 2012 - Best reviewers". emnlp-conll2012.unige.ch. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
12. "ACL 2018: Best Paper Honourable Mentions". acl2018.org. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
13. "Fellows". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2019-03-15.
14. "Mirella Lapata". Member profiles. Academia Europaea. Retrieved 2020-10-08.

• Academics of the University of Edinburgh
• 21st-century Scottish women scientists
• 21st-century Scottish scientists
• British women computer scientists
• Living people
• Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
• Carnegie Mellon University alumni
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
• Members of Academia Europaea
• Scottish computer scientists
• Natural language processing researchers