about me

I am currently a Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, after having worked for a year on the FLEXILOG ERC project as a postdoc. Previously 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).

I work on various topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP), mainly on the lexical and distributional semantics areas. Currently I'm working on integrating explicit knowledge (mainly from lexical resources) into downstream NLP applications, with a special focus on multilinguality and ambiguity. To this end, I have been collaborating on the BabelNet project and developing knowledge-based sense vector representations (e.g. NASARI and SW2V) to be used as a bridge between lexical resources and text-based applications. We have organized a tutorial at ACL 2016 and a workshop at EACL 2017 on this topic, and a tutorial at NAACL 2018 on the interplay between lexical resources and NLP.

I strongly believe that well-curated datasets and resources, as well as shared tasks, are key for advancing science. This year we are organizing a CodaLab challenge on evaluating context-sensitive representations on the WiC dataset. This competition was part of a shared task in the IJCAI workshop SemDeep, and is currently featured in the SuperGLUE language understanding benchmark. Last year we organized two SemEval 2018 tasks, on Hypernym Discovery and Emoji Prediction. Check them out!


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 top-rated chess player of South Korea.


Note: If you are interested in doing a PhD with me, please read this note to prospective PhD students.