Mirella Lapata facts for kids

Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She works in a field called natural language processing (NLP). This means she teaches computers to understand human language, like the words we speak and write.

Professor Lapata creates special computer programs and models. These help computers figure out the meaning of words and sentences from huge amounts of text. Her work helps make things like translation apps and smart assistants better.

Education and Early Career

Mirella Lapata studied at two well-known universities. She earned a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. After that, she went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she completed her PhD.

Her PhD research focused on how computers can learn about words that have many meanings. For example, the word "bank" can mean the side of a river or a place where you keep money. She used special math methods, called probabilistic methods, to help computers understand these different meanings.

After finishing her PhD, Professor Lapata worked at other universities. She held positions at Saarland University and the University of Sheffield. These roles helped her gain more experience in computer science.

Work at the University of Edinburgh

Professor Lapata later returned to the University of Edinburgh. There, she became a "reader," which is a senior academic position. Now, she is a full Professor in the School of Informatics. She holds a special title called a "personal chair" in natural language processing. This shows she is a leading expert in her field.

She is also part of important research groups in Edinburgh. These groups, like the Human Communication Research Center, study how people communicate and how computers can understand language.

Big Research Projects

From 2015 to 2017, Professor Lapata was part of a special group for the Royal Society. This group looked at how machines learn.

In 2019, she received a very important grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This grant, worth €1.9 million, supports her project called "TransModal." For five years, this project aims to teach computers how to translate information from different sources, like images and sounds, into text.

Awards and Recognitions

Professor Lapata has received many awards for her important work.

• In 2009, she was the very first person to win the Karen Spärck Jones Award. This award celebrates achievements in helping computers find information and understand language. It is named after a famous computer scientist.
• In 2012, she won an award for being one of the best reviewers at a big conference called EMNLP-CoNLL. Reviewers help decide which research papers are good enough to be presented.
• In 2018, she received an honorable mention for "Best Paper" from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). This was for a paper she wrote with Li Dong.
• In 2019, she was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This is a big honor for scientists in Scotland.
• In 2020, she was elected to the Academia Europaea. This is an association of top scientists and scholars from across Europe.