Lucia Specia
{{Short description|Professor of Natural Language Processing}}
{{Infobox scientist
| name = Lucia Specia
| workplaces = Xerox Research Centre Europe
University of Wolverhampton
University of Sheffield
Imperial College London
Dublin City University
Open University
| doctoral_advisor= {{ill|Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes|pt}}
| alma_mater = University of São Paulo
| thesis_title = A hybrid relational approach for word sense disambiguation in machine translation
| thesis_year = 2007
| thesis_url= https://doi.org/10.11606/T.55.2007.tde-05122007-205308
| website = {{Official URL}}
}}
Lucia Specia is a British computer scientist, professor of natural language processing at Imperial College London and Chief Scientist at Contex.ai.{{cite web|url=https://www.contex.ai/team|website=contex.ai|title=Our team}}{{Google scholar id}}{{EuropePMC}}{{DBLP}} She holds a joint position in language engineering at the University of Sheffield.{{cite web|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20121115125725/https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/L.Specia/|archivedate=2012-11-15|url=https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/L.Specia/|website=shef.ac.uk|title=Lucia Specia: Lecturer in Computer Science and a member of the Natural Language Processing group}}{{Scopus id}} Her research investigates data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP).{{twitter}}{{LinkedIn user}}
Early life and education
Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by {{ill|Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes|pt}}{{cite thesis|degree=PhD|first=Lucia|last=Specia|year=2007|title=A hybrid relational approach for word sense disambiguation in machine translation|oclc=691635829|doi=10.11606/T.55.2007.tde-05122007-205308|doi-access=free}} from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC).{{Cite web |title=Propor 2010 {{!}} International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Language |url=https://www.inf.pucrs.br/~propor2010/proceedings/tutorials.html |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=inf.pucrs.br}}
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.{{Cite web |date=2019-08-08 |title=Lucia Specia |url=https://khipu.ai/04_lucia_specia/ |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=khipu.ai |language=en-US}} She took up a joint appointment at the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.{{Cite web |date=2020-04-17 |title=DCU and ADAPT appoint world leading expert in natural language processing|publisher=Dublin City University|url=https://www.dcu.ie/computing/news/2021/apr/dcu-and-adapt-appoint-world-leading-expert-natural-language-processing |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=dcu.ie |language=en}}
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.{{Cite web |title=QuEst++ |url=https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/C.Scarton/qe-tutorial/handson.html |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk}} Specia was awarded an Amazon Research Award in 2016, using which she investigated the quality of machine translation for product reviews.{{Cite web |title=Lucia Specia |url=https://www.amazon.science/research-awards/recipients/lucia-specia |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=amazon.science |language=en}} In 2016 Specia was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to use multi-modal information as an input for machine learning algorithms.{{Cite web |title=Multi-modal Context Modelling for Machine Translation {{!}} MultiMT Project {{!}} Fact Sheet {{!}} H2020 |url=https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/678017 |access-date=2023-11-23 |website=europa.eu|publisher=European Commission |language=en}}
= Select publications =
- {{Cite Q|Q57265540}}
- {{Cite Q|Q64060701}}
- {{Cite Q|Q63171161}}
References
{{Reflist}}
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{{Improve categories|date=November 2023}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Specia, Lucia}}
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:University of São Paulo alumni