Mirella Lapata

Last updated
Mirella Lapata
Alma mater
Awards Karen Spärck Jones Award (2009)
ACL Fellow (2019)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions University of Edinburgh
University of Sheffield
Thesis Acquisition and modeling of lexical knowledge: a corpus-based investigation of systematic polysemy  (2000)
Doctoral advisors
Website homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlap

Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. [3] 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). [1]

Contents

Education

Lapata obtained an Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. [4] 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. [2]

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. [4] [5] 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. [6] Lapata is a member of the Human Communication Research Center and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, both in Edinburgh. [7]

Between 2015 and 2017, Lapata served as a member of the Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group. [8] Recently[ when? ] 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. [9]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

Word-sense disambiguation is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Association for Computational Linguistics</span> Professional organization devoted to linguistics

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh</span> Higher education institution

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BCS Lovelace Medal</span> Award

The Lovelace Medal was established by the British Computer Society in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awardees deliver the Lovelace Lecture.

Johanna Doris Moore is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yorick Wilks</span> British computer scientist (1939–2023)

Yorick Alexander Wilks FBCS was a British computer scientist. He was an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, senior scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and a member of the Epiphany Philosophers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Spärck Jones</span> British computer scientist (1935–2007)

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.

Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the central notion is transformation of information. In some cases, the term "informatics" may also be used with different meanings, e.g. in the context of social computing, or in context of library science.

Stephen Robertson is a British computer scientist. He is known for his work on probabilistic information retrieval together with Karen Spärck Jones and the Okapi BM25 weighting model.

Jun'ichi Tsujii is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and text mining, particularly in the field of biology and bioinformatics.

A constrained conditional model (CCM) is a machine learning and inference framework that augments the learning of conditional models with declarative constraints. The constraint can be used as a way to incorporate expressive prior knowledge into the model and bias the assignments made by the learned model to satisfy these constraints. The framework can be used to support decisions in an expressive output space while maintaining modularity and tractability of training and inference.

Dragomir R. Radev was an American computer scientist who was a professor at Yale University, working on natural language processing and information retrieval. He also served as a University of Michigan computer science professor and Columbia University computer science adjunct professor, as well as a Member of the Advisory Board of Lawyaw.

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) is a leading conference in the area of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Along with the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), it is one of the three primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research. EMNLP is organized by the ACL special interest group on linguistic data (SIGDAT) and was started in 1996, based on an earlier conference series called Workshop on Very Large Corpora (WVLC).

Sidney Michaelson FRSE FIMA FSA FBCS was Scotland's first professor of Computer Science. He was joint founder of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. As an author he is remembered for his analysis of the Bible.

To commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones, the Karen Spärck Jones Award was created in 2008 by the British Computer Society (BCS) and its Information Retrieval Specialist Group, which is sponsored by Microsoft Research.

Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hanna Wallach</span> Computational social scientist

Hanna Wallach is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at Microsoft Research. Her work makes use of machine learning models to study the dynamics of social processes. Her current research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning.

Ellen Riloff is an American computer scientist currently serving as a professor at the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on natural language processing and computational linguistics, specifically information extraction, sentiment analysis, semantic class induction, and bootstrapping methods that learn from unannotated texts.

Sharon J. Goldwater is an American and British computer scientist, cognitive scientist, developmental linguist, and natural language processing researcher who holds the Personal Chair of Computational Language Learning in the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Her research involves the unsupervised learning of language by computers, and computer modeling of language development in children.

References

  1. 1 2 Mirella Lapata publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  2. 1 2 3 4 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. Lock-green.svg
  3. "people". edinburghnlp.inf.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-02.
  4. 1 2 "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.