about me

Background. I am currently a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University. I am also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow since 2021, and co-founded the Cardiff NLP group in 2020. Before joining Cardiff University, I was a Google Doctoral Fellow and PhD student at the Linguistic Computing Laboratory (LCL) of Sapienza University of Rome. My background education includes an Erasmus Mundus Master in Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology and a 5-year BSc degree in Mathematics. I also worked for a year as a research engineer at ATILF-CNRS in Nancy (France).

Research. I work on various topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including language understanding and applications. I've written a book on Embeddings in NLP with Taher Pilehvar, where we give an overview of the recent trends in distributional semantics and NLP. These last years I have been particularly interested on how relational knowledge is captured in current NLP models (embeddings/language models - check out our latest RelBERT model!), and how this plays a role in applications. During my PhD I've also worked on integrating explicit knowledge (mainly from lexical resources) into downstream NLP applications, with a special focus on multilinguality and ambiguity.
Given the prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs), I've been interested in how to use them for applications. Particularly, how they manage to capture culture or language-specific nuances - check out our recent CREHate (best resource paper award at NAACL 2025) and BLEnD projects!

Open data. I strongly believe that well-curated datasets and resources, as well as shared tasks, are key for advancing science. In 2019 we organized the WiC challenge on evaluating context-sensitive representations. This competition was part of a shared task in the IJCAI workshop SemDeep, and was featured in the SuperGLUE language understanding benchmark. More recently, I've co-organised a SemEval task on Tabular Data Question Answering.
Finally, I have also been working on social media applications recently, check out the TweetNLP platform! We also have open datasets (TweetEval), time-specific models (TimeLMs), and multilingual language models (XLM-T). In addition to releasing these social media resources and NLP tools, I'm interested in how NLP can be used in different applications, especially socially-related ones.

Other. NLP aside, I love travelling and sports. I was raised in Granada, a wonderful city in the south of Spain where I spent the first 20 years of my life. Then, I have been living in large European cities like Paris, Barcelona and Rome, and spent long amounts of time in Seoul. I have also lived in other smaller (but equally charming) cities: Nancy and Besançon (France) and Wolverhampton (UK). I like practising all kinds of sports: football, swimming, tennis, padel, ping pong... and chess (yes, it is also a sport!). I hold the International Master chess title and am currently the Welsh chess champion and top-ranked player.

Teaching and Supervision: You can find more about my current teaching and PhD supervision here.
Note: If you are interested in doing a PhD with me, please read this note to prospective PhD students.