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]
Lapata obtained a 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 honours
In 2009 Lapata became the first recipient of the MicrosoftBritish Computer Society (BCS)/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award.[10] The award recognises achievement in furthering the progress in information retrieval and natural language processing; the award commemorates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones.
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