Research

I am currently a professor in computer science at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of EdinburghNLP, the Natural Language Processing Group at the University of Edinburgh.

My overarching research goal is to develop AI systems that not only follow patterns but reason, generalize, and adapt to novel situations. I aim to create models capable of understanding requests, aggregating and conveying information across modalities, forming long-term plans, and reasoning creatively about new challenges. My research interests focus on improving compositional generalization in deep learning models, enhancing cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models, addressing limitations in understanding and generating long contexts, and creating verifiable systems, which generate responses with supporting evidence. Problems that I'm currently excited about include:

(1) Agent-based frameworks for collaborative writing tasks (e.g., writing a story or a book chapter).
(2) Improving the representation of long context (e.g., for movie summarization, video QA).
(3) Parameter-efficient approaches for LLM generalization to new tasks.
(4) Language grounding (e.g., semantic parsing, multimodal representations).

PhD Students

Sümeyye Meryem Taşyürek (since 2026)
Jakob Johannes Bauer (since 2025)
Litu Ou (since 2025)
Akash Gupta (since September 2024)
Ashutosh Adhikari (since September 2024)
Alex Gurung (since September 2023)
Argyrios Papoudakis (since September 2022; co-supervised with Frank Keller)
Danna Zheng (since September 2022; co-supervised with Jeff Pan)

Postdoctoral Researchers

Miao Li (since 2025)
Iñigo Alonso (since 2025)
Louis Mahon (since 2023)
Laura Perez-Beltrachini (since 2018)

Alumni

Irina Saparina (PhD 2026, From Pattern Matching to Intent Reasoning in Semantic Parsing)
Agostina Calabrese (PhD 2026, Reframing Content Moderation: Guideline-Driven and Explainable Hate Speech Detection)
Danyang Liu (PhD 2026, Character Grounding and Planning for Visual Story Generation)
Parag Jain (PhD 2025, Explicit Context Representations for Conversational Language Understanding)
Tom Hosking (PhD 2024, Learning Weakly Structured Representations for Text-to-Text Generation)
Yao Fu (PhD 2024, Improving Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models)
Tom Sherborne (PhD 2024, Modelling Cross-lingual Transfer for Semantic Parsing)
Hao Zheng (PhD 2023, Towards Human-like Compositional Generalization with Neural Models)
Nelly Papalampidi (PhD 2022, Structure-aware Narrative Summarization from Multiple Views)
Yumo Xu (PhD 2022, Document Summarization with Neural Query Modeling)
Ratish Puduppully (PhD 2022, Data-to-Text Generation with Neural Planning)
Reinald Kim Amplayo (PhD 2022, Opinion Summarization of Multiple Reviews: Data Synthesis and Modeling)
Rui Cai (PhD 2021, Neural Semantic Role Labeling with more and less Supervision)
Jonathan Mallinson (PhD 2021, Universal Rewriting via Machine Translation)
Jiangming Liu (PhD 2021, Understanding and Generating Language with Discourse Representation Structures)
Yang Liu (PhD 2020, Neural Document Modeling and Summarization)
Li Dong (PhD 2019, Learning Natural Language Interfaces with Neural Models)
Stefanos Angelidis (PhD 2019, Weakly Supervised Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Extraction)
Jianpeng Cheng (PhD 2019,  The Lifecycle of Neural Semantic Parsing)
Philip Gorinski (PhD 2018, Automatic Movie Analysis and Summarization)
Xingxing Zhang (PhD 2017, Natural Language Generation as Sequence Learning and Beyond)
Siva Reddy (PhD 2017, Syntax-Mediated Semantic Parsing)
Lea Frermann (PhD 2016, Bayesian Models of Category Acquisition and Meaning Development)
Carina Silberer (PhD 2015, Learning Visually Grounded Meaning Representations)
Ioannis Konstas (PhD 2014, Joint Models for Concept-to-text Generation)
Trevor Fountain (PhD 2013, Modelling the Acquisition of Natural Language Categories)
Joel Lang (PhD 2012, Unsupervised Induction of Semantic Roles)
Yansong Feng (PhD 2011, Automatic Caption Generation for News Images)
Neil McIntyre (PhD 2011, Learning to Tell Tales: Automatic Story Generation from Corpora)
Jeff Mitchell (PhD 2011, Composition in Distributional Models of Semantics)
Sam Brody (PhD 2009, Closing the Gap in WSD: Supervised results with Unsupervised Methods)
James Clarke (PhD 2008, Global Inference for Sentence Compression: An Integer Linear Programming Approach)
Sebastian Padó (PhD 2007, Cross-Lingual Annotation Projection Models for Role-Semantic Information)

Journals and Conference Papers


This page contains publications for the past three years. For older papers, please consult my Google Scholar Profile and/or the ACL anthology.

Publications 2026


Lightweight Latent Reasoning for Narrative Tasks
Alexander Gurung, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Mirella Lapata. TACL (2026) Paper Code Blog

Generating Visual Stories with Grounded and Coreferent Characters
Danyang Liu, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller. TACL (2026) Paper

Meta-Adaptive Prompt Distillation for Few-Shot Visual Question Answering
Akash Gupta, Amos Storkey, Mirella Lapata. ICLR (2026) Paper Code

TABLET: A Large-Scale Dataset for Robust Visual Table Understanding
Iñigo Alonso, Imanol Miranda, Eneko Agirre, Mirella Lapata. ICLR (2026) Paper Code

Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books
Argyrios Papoudakis, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller. ACL Findings (2026) Paper Code

Long-Context Reasoning Through Proxy-Based Chain-of-Thought Tuning
Miao Li, Irina Saparina, Alexander Gurung, Mirella Lapata. ACL (2026) Paper Code

Action-Level Credit Assignment for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP Findings (2026), to appear Code

GraphLit: Learning Text-Enriched Dynamic Character Network Representations for Literary Study
Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP (2026), to appear Paper Code

Storyline Trees: Hierarchical Representations for Long-Form Narratives
Litu Ou, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP Findings (2026), to appear Paper Code

Multimodal Latent Reasoning via Predictive Embeddings
Ashutosh Adhikari, Mirella Lapata. COLM (2026) Paper

Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests
Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata. COLM (2026) Paper Code

Learning Steerable Clarification Policies with Collaborative Self-play
Jonathan Berant, Maximillian Chen, Adam Fisch, Reza Aghajani, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata, Jacob Eisenstein. COLM (2026) Paper

MT-PingEval: Evaluating Multi-Turn Collaboration with Private Information Games
Jacob Eisenstein, Fantine Huot, Adam Fisch, Jonathan Berant, Mirella Lapata. COLM (2026) Paper

REFRAMED: Towards Realistic Audio Description Generation for Movies
Igor Sterner, Mirella Lapata, Alex Lascarides, Frank Keller. COLM (2026) Paper Dataset

Publications 2025


Uncertainty Quantification in Retrieval Augmented Question Answering
Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Mirella Lapata. TMLR (2025) Paper

Explanatory Summarization with Discourse-Driven Planning
Dongqi Liu, Xi Yu, Vera Demberg, Mirella Lapata. TACL (2025) Paper

DOLOMITES: Domain-Specific Long-Form Methodical Tasks
Chaitanya Malaviya, Priyanka Agrawal, Kuzman Ganchev, Pranesh Srinivasan, Fantine Huot, Jonathan Berant, Mark Yatskar, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata, Chris Alberti. TACL (2025) Paper Code

Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation
Alexander Gurung, Mirella Lapata. COLM (2025) Paper

Debating for Better Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Ashutosh Adhikari, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP Findings (2025) Paper

Compositional Generalisation for Explainable Hate Speech Detection
Agostina Calabrese, Tom Sherborne, Björn Ross, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP (2025) Paper

Long-Form Information Alignment Evaluation Beyond Atomic Facts
Danna Zheng, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan. EMNLP (2025) Paper

Context-Aware Hierarchical Merging for Long Document Summarization
Litu Ou, Mirella Lapata. ACL Findings (2025) Paper

Help Me Write a Story: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Generate Writing Feedback
Hannah Rashkin, Elizabeth Clark, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata. ACL (2025) Paper

Decomposed Opinion Summarization with Verified Aspect-Aware Modules
Miao Li, Jey Han Lau, Eduard Hovy, Mirella Lapata. ACL Findings (2025) Paper

Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing
Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata. ACL Findings (2025) Paper

Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation
Wenyu Huang, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan. ACL (2025) Paper

What Is That Talk About? A Video-to-Text Summarization Dataset for Scientific Presentations
Dongqi Liu, Chenxi Whitehouse, Xi Yu, Louis Mahon, Rohit Saxena, Zheng Zhao, Yifu Qiu, Mirella Lapata, Vera Demberg. ACL (2025) Paper

Agents' Room: Narrative Generation through Multi-step Collaboration
Fantine Huot, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Jennimaria Palomaki, Alice Shoshana Jakobovits, Elizabeth Clark, Mirella Lapata. ICLR (2025) Paper

Publications 2024


Hierarchical Indexing for Retrieval-Augmented Opinion Summarization
Tom Hosking, Hao Tang, Mirella Lapata. TACL (2024) Paper Code

AMBROSIA: A Benchmark for Parsing Ambiguous Questions into Database Queries
Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata. NeurIPS (2024) Paper Code

Finding the Right Moment: Human-Assisted Trailer Creation via Task Decomposition
Pinelopi Papalampidi, Frank Keller, Mirella Lapata. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 46:1, 292-304 Paper Code

Evaluating LLMs for Targeted Concept Simplification for Domain-Specific Texts
Sumit Asthana, Hannah Rashkin, Elizabeth Clark, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP (2024)
Paper Code

Low-Rank Adaptation for Multilingual Summarization: An Empirical Study
Chenxi Whitehouse, Fantine Huot, Jasmijn Bastings, Mostafa Dehghani, Chu-Cheng Lin, Mirella Lapata. NAACL Findings (2024) Paper Code

BookWorm: A Dataset for Character Description and Analysis
Argyrios Papoudakis, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller. EMNLP Findings (2024) Paper Code

CHIRON: Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narratives
Alex Gurung, Mirella Lapata. EMNLP Findings (2024) Paper Code

Less is More: Making Smaller Language Models Competent Subgraph Retrievers for Multi-hop KGQA Wenyu Huang, Guancheng Zhou, Hongru Wang, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan. EMNLP Findings (2024) Paper Code

Archer: A Human-Labeled Text-to-SQL Dataset with Arithmetic, Commonsense and Hypothetical Reasoning Danna Zheng, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan. EACL (2024) Paper Code

Improving Generalization in Semantic Parsing by Increasing Natural Language Variation
Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata. EACL (2024) Paper Code

μPLAN: Summarizing Using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge
Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata. EACL (2024) Paper Code

PixT3: Pixel-based Table-to-Text Generation
Iñigo Alonso, Eneko Agirre, Mirella Lapata. ACL (2024) Paper Code

A Modular Approach for Multimodal Summarization of TV Shows
Louis Mahon, Mirella Lapata. ACL (2024) Paper Code

Learning to Plan and Generate Text with Citations
Constanza Fierro, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Fantine Huot, Nicola De Cao, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata. ACL (2024) Paper Code

Explainability and Hate Speech: Structured Explanations Make Social Media Moderators Faster
Agostina Calabrese, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten Bos, Björn Ross, Mirella Lapata, Francesco Barbieri. ACL (2024) Paper Code

Little Red Riding Hood Goes around the Globe: Crosslingual Story Planning and Generation with Large Language Models
Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Joshua Maynez, Annie Louis, Mirella Lapata, Shashi Narayan.
LREC (2024) Paper Code

Current Projects

Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab, national AI research lab led by UCL with Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh, funded by UKRI (lab website), 2026-present.
AI Hub in Generative Models, funded by UKRI and EPSRC (hub website), 2024-present.
UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world NLP, Research Training Grant, funded by UKRI, 2024-2032.
Teaching Machines to Reason like Humans, Turing AI Fellowship, funded by UKRI, 2021-2027.
UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing, Research Training Grant, funded by UKRI, 2019-2027.

Past Projects

Addressing Hallucinations in Generative Language Models, Innovate UK award, funded by UKRI, 02/2024-02/2025.
Multimodal Summarization of Creative Content, funded by Amazon, 01/2022-01/2023.
Generating Opinion Summaries and their Explanations from User Reviews, funded by Megagon Labs, 08/2019-07/2020.
Question-Answering with Knowledge Graph Queries, funded by Huawei, 2021-2024.
Real-world Semantic Parsing, funded by Amazon, 2020-2021.
Foreign Language Automated Information Retrieval (FLAIR), funded by IARPA-BAA-16-11, 10/2017-08/2021.
Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text, Consolidator Grant (CoG), funded by the ERC, 09/2016-08/2021.
A Unified Model of Compositional and Distributional Semantics: Theory and Applications, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC, 03/2013-03/2016.
Readers: Evaluation and Development of Reading Systems, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC
An integrated model of syntactic and semantic prediction in human language processing, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC, 07/2011-02/2015.
Global Inference for Summarization Using Integer Linear Programming, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC, 01/2009-01/2012.
Ranking Word Senses for Disambiguation: Models and Applications, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC, 09/2005-09/2008.
Statistical Models for Text-to-text Generation, Advanced Fellowship, funded by the EPSRC, 02/2005-01/2010.
Application-based Text-to-Text Generation, Research Project Grant, funded by the EPSRC, 06/2006-06/2009.
Robust Pragmatics for Narrative Text, funded by the EPSRC, 01/2002-03/2005.

AI @ Edinburgh

The Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL) at the University of Edinburgh is a centre of excellence dedicated to researching all aspects of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in society. Uniting the diverse research expertise across the University with generative AI at its core, GAIL taps into a thriving AI landscape with recognised strengths in natural language processing, machine learning, and data-driven innovation.

The Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence (ELIAI) at the School of Informatics is seeking to enhance neural network models with reasoning capabilities, a skill required to enable many AI applications.

The UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world NLP is a PhD training programme aiming to develop doctoral graduates that represent a new paradigm of interdisciplinary NLP researcher, who are ready to realise the full potential of NLP-based systems and enable richer interactions that allow genuine partnerships between humans and AI.