| Lucia Specia | |
| Workplaces: | Xerox Research Centre Europe University of Wolverhampton University of Sheffield Imperial College London Dublin City University Open University |
| 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 |
Lucia Specia is a British computer scientist, professor of natural language processing at Imperial College London and Chief Scientist at Contex.ai.[1] She holds a joint position in language engineering at the University of Sheffield.[2] Her research investigates data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP).
Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by [3] from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC).[2] [4]
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.[5] She took up a joint appointment at the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.[6]
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.[7] Specia was awarded an Amazon Research Award in 2016, using which she investigated the quality of machine translation for product reviews.[8] In 2016 Specia was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to use multi-modal information as an input for machine learning algorithms.[9]