Lucia Specia

Lucia Specia is a British computer scientist, professor of natural language processing at Imperial College London and Chief Scientist at Contex.ai. She holds a joint position in language engineering at the University of Sheffield. Her research investigates data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP).

Early life and education
Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC).

Research and career
After earning her PhD, Specia moved to Xerox Research Centre Europe, where she worked as a research engineer. In 2010 Specia joined the University of Wolverhampton as a senior lecturer. She moved to the University of Sheffield in 2012, and Imperial College London in 2018. She took up a joint appointment at the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.

Specia specialises in natural language processing using multi-modal input data, quality estimations in machine learning and the intersection of language and vision. She developed QuEst, an open source software tool used for quality estimation for machine translation. Specia was awarded an Amazon Research Award in 2016, using which she investigated the quality of machine translation for product reviews. In 2016 Specia was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to use multi-modal information as an input for machine learning algorithms.