Lucia Specia

Machine translation researcher


Lucia Specia is a researcher and professor of natural language processing. She led early research on machine translation quality estimation.

Her work on quality estimation includes:

  • organising the quality estimation shared task at WMT
  • leading the research group that created early quality estimation libraries
  • the book Quality Estimation for Machine Translation

She had also researched machine translation, image captioning and text adaptation.

Specia studied at the University of São Paulo. She then worked as a research engineer at Machine Learning for Document Access and Translation group at Xerox Research. In 2009, Specia joined the computational linguistics research group at the University of Wolverhampton as a senior lecturer.

In 2012, she started as senior lecturer in computer science and professor of language engineering at the University of Sheffield.

In 2018, Specia joined Imperial College London as a professor of natural language processing.

Starting in 2019, she advised Facebook AI Research on quality estimation.

In 2020, Specia also joined Dublin City University.

In 2021, she co-founded conteX.ai, as Chief Scientist.


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