Lucia Specia
Lucia Specia is a British computer scientist, professor of natural language processing at Imperial College London, Director of Research Engineering at Epic Games 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.
Early life and education
Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional.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.