Research Interests

I am interested in Natural Language Processing and Multimodal Machine Learning, more specifically:
  • Language grounding on additional modalities, particularly vision and audio, and for tasks where language is generated as output
  • Machine translation, particularly linguistically-motivated and context-rich approaches using multimodal sources of information
  • Quality evaluation and estimation of machine translation and other NLP applications
  • Text adaptation (or monolingual translation), especially text simplification

Funded Projects

  • 2019-2022: Bergamot: Browser-based Multilingual Translation, EU H2020 RIA
  • 2018-2020: APE-QUEST: Automatic Post-Editing and Quality Estimation, EU CEF Integration Projects
  • 2018-2020: MMVC: A Multimodal and Multilingual Framework for Video Captioning, British Coundil and Tubitak, Newton Fund
  • 2016-2021: MultiMT: Multimodal context modelling for Machine Translation, EU H2020 ERC Starting Grant

The Team

We work very closely with the Speech and Hearing Research Group

Research staff

PhD Students

  • Thales Bertaglia: Exploring Acoustic Cues for Natural Language Processing
  • Chiraag Lala: Investigating Lexical Disambiguation in Multimodal Machine Translation
  • Fernando Alva Manchego : Lexico-syntactic Approaches for Sentence Simplification
  • David Steele: Discourse Markers in the Context of Statistical Machine Translation


Past projects, PhD students, staff, academic visitors

Funded Projects

  • 2016-2019: SIMPATICO: SIMplifying the interaction with Public Administration Through Information technology for Citizens and cOmpanies, EU H2020 RIA
  • 2017-2018: AARA: Predicting Relevance and Quality of Machine Translation for Product Reviews, Amazon AARA
  • 2015-2018: iV&L Net: European Network on Integrating Vision and Language, EU COST Action
  • 2015-2018: QT21: Quality Translation 21, EU H2020 RIA
  • 2015-2018: Cracker: Cracking the Language Barrier, EU H2020 CSA
  • 2012-2016: EXPERT: EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation, EU FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network
  • 2015-2015: QuEst++: Adding word-level feature extraction into QuEst, EAMT Sponsorship
  • 2013-2015: MODIST: Modelling Discourse in Translation, EPSRC First Grant
  • 2012-2014: QTLaunchPad: Preparation and launch of a large-scale action for quality translation technology, EU FP7 Coordination and Support Action
  • 2014-2014: Integration of QuEst within OKAPI, EAMT Sponsorship
  • 2012-2012: QuEst: An open source tool for machine translation Quality Estimation, PASCAL2 Harvest
  • 2012-2012: Using images as context for Statistical Machine Translation, Pump priming V&L Net
  • 2010-2011: Estimating the Adequacy of Machine Translation, DARPA GALE program

Completed PhD students
  • Karin Sim Smith (University of Sheffield, November 2017): Coherence in Machine Translation
  • Varvara Logacheva (University of Sheffield, July 2017): Human Feedback in Statistical Machine Translation
  • Daniel Beck (University of Sheffield, March 2017): Gaussian Processes for Text Regression
  • Carolina Scarton (University of Sheffield, December 2016): Document-level Machine Translation Quality Estimation
  • Gustavo Paetzold (University of Sheffield, October 2016): Lexical Simplification for Non-Native English Speakers
  • Xingyi Song (University of Sheffield, July 2016): Discriminative Training for Statistical Machine Translation
  • Miguel Angel Rios Gaona (University of Wolverhampton, Nov 2014): Methods for Measuring Semantic Similarity of Texts
  • Wilker Aziz (University of Wolverhampton, Jan 2014): Exact Sampling and Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation
  • Yvonne Skalban (University of Wolverhampton, Dec 2013): Automatic Generation of Factual Questions from Video Documentaries
  • Miranda Chong (University of Wolverhampton, Jul 2013): A Study on Plagiarism Detection and Plagiarism Direction Identification Using Natural Language Processing Techniques, now RA at Wolverhampton University
  • Sofia Angeletou (Open University, 2010): Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomies
Research staff on projects
  • Carolina Scarton (now Academic Fellow at University of Sheffield)
  • Gustavo Paetzold (now a lecturer at the Federal Technological University, Brazil)
  • Kashif Shah (now Senior Research Scientist at Amazon AI)
  • Wilker Aziz (now assistant professor at University of Amsterdam)
  • Najeh Hajlaoui (now Project Manager at European Parliament)
  • Catalina Hallett (now Manager at Deloitte UK)
Academic visitors
  • Josiel Maimone de Figueiredo: Multimodal machine learning (Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil)
  • Mikel Forcada: Quality estimation (Universitat d'Alacant, Spain)
  • Ying Qin: Quality estimation and evaluation for translation student essays (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China)
  • Jorge Bidarra: Word-sense disambiguation for sign language-Portuguese translation (Unioeste, Brazil)
  • Claudia Martins: Detection and Translation of Multi-Word Expressions (Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil)