Professor Aline Villavicencio
MPhil, PhD
School of Computer Science
Chair in Natural Language Processing
Member of the Natural Language Processing research group
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+44 114 222 1860
Full contact details
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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Aline Villavicencio received her PhD and MPhil degrees from the University of Cambridge (UK) and MSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).
She was a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) (in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in 2014/2015 and in the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems in 2011/2012) at the Laboratoire LaTTiCe at the École Normale Supérieure (France) in 2014, an Erasmus-Mundus Visiting Scholar at Saarland University (Germany) in 2012/2013, and at the University of Bath in 2006-2009.
From 2007-2017 she held a Research Fellowship from the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq). She is also affiliated to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
- Research interests
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Her research interests are in lexical semantics, multilinguality, and cognitively motivated NLP. This work includes techniques for Multiword Expression treatment using statistical methods and distributional semantic models, and applications like Text Simplification and Question Answering, for languages like English and Portuguese.
- Publications
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Books
- Language, Cognition, and Computational Models. Cambridge University Press.
- Preface. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Edited books
- View this article in WRRO
- Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language - 13th International Conference (PROPOR 2018).. Springer.
Journal articles
- Multi-perspective thought navigation for source-free entity linking. Pattern Recognition Letters, 178, 84-90.
- Representation transfer and data cleaning in multi-views for text simplification. Pattern Recognition Letters.
- Alterations in the Gut Microbiome at 6 Months of Age in Obese Latino Infants. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 39(1), 47-53.
- Discovering multiword expressions. Natural Language Engineering, 25(6), 715-733. View this article in WRRO
- How the brain represents language and answers questions? Using an AI system to understand the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 13. View this article in WRRO
- Unsupervised Compositionality Prediction of Nominal Compounds. Computational Linguistics, 45(1), 1-57. View this article in WRRO
- Size Does Not Matter. Frequency Does. A Study of Features for Measuring Lexical Complexity, 129-140.
- Estratégias de evocação lexical com critério semântico em adultos após acidente vascular cerebral no hemisfério direito. Letrônica, 7(1), 325-347. View this article in WRRO
- Graph analysis of semantic word association among children, adults, and the elderly. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 27(1), 90-99. View this article in WRRO
- Introduction to the special issue on multiword expressions. ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, 10(2), 1-10.
- Book Review: Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction, by Violeta Seretan. Natural Language Engineering, 18(4), 575-579.
- Alternating predictive and short-term memory modes of entorhinal grid cells. Hippocampus, 22(8), 1647-1651.
- Alignment-based extraction of multiword expressions. Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(1-2), 59-77.
- Prepositions in Applications: A Survey and Introduction to the Special Issue. Computational Linguistics, 35(2), 119-149.
- The availability of verb–particle constructions in lexical resources: How much is enough?. Computer Speech & Language, 19(4), 415-432.
- Introduction to the special issue on multiword expressions: Having a crack at a hard nut. Computer Speech & Language, 19(4), 365-377.
- Investigating Idiomaticity in Word Representations. Computational Linguistics, 1-48.
- Mechanistic role of alpha oscillations in a computational model of working memory. PLOS ONE, 19(2), e0296217-e0296217.
- Assessing linguistic generalisation in language models: a dataset for Brazilian Portuguese. Language Resources and Evaluation.
- An HPSG account of closest conjunct agreement in NP coordination in Portuguese. Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
- Verb-particle constructions in a computational grammar of English. Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
Chapters
- Foreword, IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature (pp. viii-xi). John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Introduction: Cognitive issues in natural language processing, Language, Cognition, and Computational Models (pp. 3-24).
- Computational Treatment of Multiword Expressions, The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics 2nd edition
- brWaC: A WaCky Corpus for Brazilian Portuguese, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 201-206). Springer International Publishing
- Computational Modeling as a Methodology for Studying Human Language Learning, Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition (pp. 1-25). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Language Acquisition with Feature‐Based Grammars, Non-Transformational Syntax (pp. 404-442).
- Verb-Particle Constructions in the World Wide Web, Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions (pp. 115-130).
Conference proceedings papers
- SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding. Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022), July 2022 - July 2022.
- Assessing the Representations of Idiomaticity in Vector Models with a Noun Compound Dataset Labeled at Type and Token Levels. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), August 2021 - August 2021.
- AStitchInLanguageModels : dataset and methods for the exploration of idiomaticity in pre-trained language models. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 7 November 2021 - 11 November 2021.
- When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts : multiword expressions and idiomaticity. Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019). Florence, Italy, 2 August 2019 - 2 August 2019. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Speech with Attention. Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp 2678-2682), 2 September 2018 - 6 September 2018. View this article in WRRO
- A corpus study of verbal multiword expressions in Brazilian Portuguese. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (pp 24-34). Canela, Brazil, 24 September 2018 - 26 September 2018. View this article in WRRO
- Restricted recurrent neural tensor networks: Exploiting word frequency and compositionality. ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 2 (pp 8-13) View this article in WRRO
- Similarity Measures for the Detection of Clinical Conditions with Verbal Fluency Tasks. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), 1 June 2018 - 6 June 2018. View this article in WRRO
- Unwritten languages demand attention too! Word discovery with encoder-decoder models. 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), 16 December 2017 - 20 December 2017. View this article in WRRO
- Predicting the Compositionality of Nominal Compounds: Giving Word Embeddings a Hard Time. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp 1986-1997). Berlin, Germany, 7 August 2016 - 12 August 2016. View this article in WRRO
- Matrix Factorization using Window Sampling and Negative Sampling for Improved Word Representations. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (pp 419-424), 7 August 2016 - 12 August 2016. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- How Naked is the Naked Truth? A Multilingual Lexicon of Nominal Compound Compositionality. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), August 2016 - August 2016. View this article in WRRO
- Filtering and Measuring the Intrinsic Quality of Human
Compositionality Judgments. Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions, August 2016 - August 2016. View this article in WRRO
- The Portuguese B $$^2$$ 2 SG: A Semantic Test for Distributional Thesaurus (pp 333-339)
- UFRGSandLIF at SemEval-2016 Task 10: Rule-Based MWE Identification and Predominant-Supersense Tagging. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016), June 2016 - June 2016. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Joining Forces for Multiword Expression Identification (pp 233-238)
- View this article in WRRO
- Crawling by Readability Level (pp 306-318)
- View this article in WRRO
- Nothing like Good Old Frequency: Studying Context Filters for Distributional Thesauri. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2014 - October 2014. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language
- View this article in WRRO
- A Hybrid Approach for Multiword Expression Identification (pp 65-74)
- Question Answering for Portuguese: How Much Is Needed? (pp 173-182)
- Identification of Multiword Expressions in Technical Domains: Investigating Statistical and Alignment-Based Approaches. 2009 Seventh Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology, 8 September 2009 - 11 September 2009.
- Preface. 2009 Seventh Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology, 8 September 2009 - 11 September 2009.
- Statistically-driven alignment-based multiword expression identification for technical domains. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions Identification, Interpretation, Disambiguation and Applications - MWE '09, 6 August 2009 - 6 August 2009.
- Picking them up and figuring them out. Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning - CoNLL '08, 16 August 2008 - 17 August 2008.
- Automated multiword expression prediction for grammar engineering. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties - MWE '06, 23 July 2006 - 23 July 2006.
- Lexical encoding of MWEs. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions Integrating Processing - MWE '04, 26 July 2004 - 26 July 2004.
- A hierarchical description of the Portuguese verb (pp 302-311)
- Part-of-speech tagging for portuguese texts (pp 323-332)
- View this article in WRRO
- Empirical Evaluation of Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Word Discovery in Low-Resource Settings. Interspeech 2019 View this article in WRRO
- Detecting Neuropsychiatric Conditions With Semantic Verbal Fluency. LatinX in AI at Neural Information Processing Systems Conference 2018
- A Small Griko-Italian Speech Translation Corpus. The 6th Intl. Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
Preprints
- Rolling the DICE on Idiomaticity: How LLMs Fail to Grasp Context, arXiv.
- Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Loss, arXiv.
- Vocabulary Expansion for Low-resource Cross-lingual Transfer, arXiv.
- Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection, arXiv.
- Is Less More? Quality, Quantity and Context in Idiom Processing with Natural Language Models, arXiv.
- An Empirical Study on Cross-lingual Vocabulary Adaptation for Efficient Language Model Inference, arXiv.
- Effective Cross-Task Transfer Learning for Explainable Natural Language Inference with T5, arXiv.
- View this article in WRRO
- A novel specific artificial intelligence-based method to identify COVID-19 cases using simple blood exams.
- Language, Cognition, and Computational Models. Cambridge University Press.
- Grants
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Current Grants
Previous grants
- Modelling the link between working memory and language deficits in schizophrenia, Royal Society, 12/2020 - 09/2024, £74,000, as Co-PI
- Modeling Idiomaticity in Human and Artificial Language Processing, EPSRC, 12/2020 - 11/2024, £446,163, as PI
- Professional activities and memberships
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Some of her recent activities include being the PC co-chair of the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2019), Area Chair for events like ACL-2019, NAACL-2018, COLING 2018, and General co-chair for the 13th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2018).
She is a member of the advisory board of WiNLP, of the editorial board of TACL, JNLE, Journal of Language Modelling and Linguamatica, and a reviewer for various conferences, in addition to having co-chaired numerous *ACL workshops on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition and on Multiword Expressions. She has also co-edited special issues and books dedicated to these topics.
She is a member of the Natural Language Processing group at the University of Sheffield and of the Neurocomputational and Language Processing Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).