Laura Perez-Beltrachini

My research aims at developing machines that have language skills to carry out tasks to assist humans (e.g., search, summarise and translate content in response to a request for information) and that can directly communicate with humans in natural language (e.g., a conversational search agent). My research focuses on how to enable machines with natural language understanding and generation capabilities. I draw on symbolic precise computational models of language as well as data-driven methods which are robust and scalable. I work on the following NLP problems: data-to-text generation, text summarisation, cross- and multi-lingual summarisation, and semantic parsing.

I work with Mirella Lapata and I am part of the Edinburgh NLP Group.

Previously, I was a Postdoc at Synalp Team, LORIA working with Claire Gardent and before a Postdoc at KRDB Research Centre working with Enrico Franconi. I completed a PhD in Computer Science at Université de Lorraine. I obtained a joint MSc degree in Language and Communication Technologies from Université Nancy 2 and the University of Bolzano, and a research oriented MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Comahue (Maths by FaEA and CS by FI. First math course 😄. MSc advisors: Alejandra Cechich, Agustina Buccella).

News

• Senior Area Chair, Summarisation, ACL 2024
• Huajian's paper accepted at EACL 2024