Mirella Lapata facts for kids

Mirella Lapata is a smart 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 and use human language, just like we do!

Her main goal is to help computers figure out the meaning of words and sentences from huge amounts of text. She creates special computer programs and models to do this.

Education and Early Research

Mirella Lapata studied at two famous universities. First, she earned a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. After that, she went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she earned her PhD.

For her PhD, she researched how computers could 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.

Career and Big Projects

After finishing her PhD, Professor Lapata worked at other universities before coming back to the University of Edinburgh. There, she became a full Professor in Natural Language Processing. She is also part of important research groups in Edinburgh that study how humans communicate and think.

From 2015 to 2017, she was part of a group for the Royal Society that looked at how machine learning works. Machine learning is when computers learn from data without being directly programmed for every task.

Recently, Professor Lapata received a very big grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This grant is worth €1.9 million (about $2 million USD) and will fund her project for five years. Her project is called TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text. This means she wants to teach computers to create text from different types of information, like pictures, sounds, or videos, not just other text.

Awards and Recognitions

Professor Lapata has won several important awards for her work:

• In 2009, she was the first person to receive the Karen Spärck Jones Award. This award celebrates people who make great progress in helping computers find information and understand language. It's 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 new research papers are good enough to be published.
• In 2018, she received an honorable mention for a "Best Paper" award from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). This means her research paper was one of the best presented that year.
• In 2019, she was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This is a big honor for scientists and thinkers in Scotland.
• In 2020, she was elected to the Academia Europaea. This is a group of top European scientists and scholars.