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. I am also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow since February 2021, and run the Cardiff NLP group. 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. In this area I've recently written a book (titled Embeddings in NLP) with Taher Pilehvar that can 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), 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. 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. 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 is featured in the SuperGLUE language understanding benchmark. In 2020 we extended this effort with the WiC-TSV dataset. In the past I also helped organize several SemEval tasks in Word Similarity Hypernym Discovery and Emoji Prediction. Check them out as all datasets are openly available and in various languages!
Finally, I have also been working on social media applications recently, for which we also have open datasets (TweetEval) and cross-lingual embedding models!


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.

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