Lucia Specia

Lucia Specia I am Professor of Language Engineering and a member of the Natural Language Processing group. I am also Professor of Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London. My research focuses on various aspects of data-driven approaches to natural language processing, with a particular interest in multimodal and multilingual context models and work at the intersection of language and vision. My work has various applications such as machine translation, image captioning, quality estimation and text adaptation.

I currently hold an ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant on Multi-modal Context Modelling for Machine Translation.

In the past I worked as senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton (2009-2011), where I was a member of the Computational Linguistics research group. I also worked as research engineer for the Machine Learning for Document Access and Translation group, at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, in France (2008-2009).

I received a PhD from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. I was supervised by Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC), USP - Brazil, and Mark Stevenson from the Natural Language Processing Group, Sheffield University - UK. The topic of my PhD was Word Sense Disambiguation applied to Machine Translation.