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.