Professor Aline Villavicencio
MPhil, PhD
School of Computer Science
Chair in Natural Language Processing
Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Member of the Natural Language Processing research group
a.villavicencio@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 1860
+44 114 222 1860
Regent Court (DCS)
Full contact details
Professor Aline Villavicencio
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
91Ö±²¥
S1 4DP
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
91Ö±²¥
S1 4DP
- Profile
-
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 LaboÂraÂtoire LaTTiCe at the École Normale SupéÂrieure (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
-
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
-
Books
- . Cambridge University Press.
- Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition. Springer Science & Business Media.
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface.
- . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Edited books
- Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- . Springer.
Journal articles
- . Pattern Recognition Letters, 178, 84-90.
- Word Boundary Information Isn't Useful for Encoder Language Models.. CoRR, abs/2401.07923.
- Vocabulary Expansion for Low-resource Cross-lingual Transfer.. CoRR, abs/2406.11477.
- Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Loss.. CoRR, abs/2406.15175.
- An Empirical Study on Cross-lingual Vocabulary Adaptation for Efficient Generative LLM Inference.. CoRR, abs/2402.10712.
- . Pattern Recognition Letters.
- Introduction. EMNLP 2020 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Tutorial Abstracts, III.
- . Natural Language Engineering, 25(6), 715-733.
- . Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 13.
- . Computational Linguistics, 45(1), 1-57.
- , 129-140.
- . ³¢±ð³Ù°ùô²Ô¾±³¦²¹, 7(1), 325-347.
- . Psicologia: Reflexão e CrÃtica, 27(1), 90-99.
- . ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, 10(2), 1-10.
- . Natural Language Engineering, 18(4), 575-579.
- . Hippocampus, 22(8), 1647-1651.
- . Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(1-2), 59-77.
- . Computational Linguistics, 35(2), 119-149.
- . Computer Speech & Language, 19(4), 415-432.
- . Computer Speech & Language, 19(4), 365-377.
- . Computational Linguistics, 1-48.
- Finding Idiomaticity in Word Representations. Computational Linguistics.
- . PLOS ONE, 19(2), e0296217-e0296217.
- . Language Resources and Evaluation.
- Understanding the Effects of Negative (and Positive) Pointwise Mutual Information on Word Vectors. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.
- . Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
- . Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
- Investigating Alignment Interpretability for Low-resource NMT. Machine Translation.
Chapters
- , IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature (pp. viii-xi). John Benjamins Publishing Company
- , Language, Cognition, and Computational Models (pp. 3-24).
- , The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics 2nd edition
- , Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 201-206). Springer International Publishing
- The Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis and conventionality: A crosslinguistic study on verb acquisition by Chinese Mandarin- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children, Lexical Bootstrapping: The Role of Lexis and Semantics in Child Language Development (pp. 73-97).
- , Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition (pp. 1-25). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- , Non-Transformational Syntax (pp. 404-442).
- Portuguese: Corpora, coordination and agreement, Roots: Linguistics in Search of its Evidential Base (pp. 9-28).
- , Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions (pp. 115-130).
Conference proceedings papers
- Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection. Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies, MWE-UD 2024 at LREC-COLING 2024 - Workshop Proceedings (pp 178-187)
- Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Loss.. ACL (Findings) (pp 12473-12485)
- ShefCDTeam at SemEval-2024 Task 4: A Text-to-Text Model for Multi-Label Classification. PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SEMANTIC EVALUATION, SEMEVAL-2024 (pp 1860-1867)
- Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1 (pp 562-574)
- FLYPE: Multitask Prompt Tuning for Multimodal Human Understanding of Social Media. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3566 (pp 18-33)
- Sample Efficient Approaches for Idiomaticity Detection. Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2022)
- SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding. Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)
- . Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022), July 2022 - July 2022.
- Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Discrete Speech Units in Low-Resource Settings. 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages, SIGUL 2022 - held in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2022 - Proceedings (pp 1-9)
- Message from the Program Chairs. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp vii-xi)
- Message from the Program Chairs. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1 (pp vii-xi)
- Sample Efficient Approaches for Idiomaticity Detection. LREC 2022 Workshop - Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 18th Workshop on Multiword Expressions, MWE 2022 - Proceedings (pp 105-111)
- SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding.. SemEval@NAACL (pp 107-121)
- Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Discrete Speech Units in Low-Resource Settings. Proceedings of 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022), 24 June 2022 - 25 June 2022.
- . 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.
- What if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? Modelling Complex (Multiword) Expressions. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2944 (pp 1-10)
- Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021): Workshop and Shared Task Report. 4th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-Political Events from Text, CASE 2021 - Proceedings (pp 1-9)
- . Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 7 November 2021 - 11 November 2021.
- AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models.. EMNLP (Findings) (pp 3464-3477)
- Preface. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2693
- . Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019). Florence, Italy, 2 August 2019 - 2 August 2019.
- Introduction. CoNLL 2019 - 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings of the Conference (pp iii-iv)
- The BRWAC corpus: A new open resource for Brazilian Portuguese. LREC 2018 - 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp 4339-4344)
- . Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp 2678-2682), 2 September 2018 - 6 September 2018.
- . Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (pp 24-34). Canela, Brazil, 24 September 2018 - 26 September 2018.
- . ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 2 (pp 8-13)
- . 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.
- . 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), 16 December 2017 - 20 December 2017.
- LexSubNC: A dataset of lexical substitution for nominal compounds. 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics, IWCS 2017 - Short Papers
- . 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.
- . 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.
- Multiword expressions in child language. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 2307-2311)
- Verblexpor: A lexical resource with semantic roles for Portuguese. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 2656-2661)
- . Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), August 2016 - August 2016.
- . Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions, August 2016 - August 2016.
- (pp 333-339)
- . Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016), June 2016 - June 2016.
- B2SG: A toefl-like task for Portuguese. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 3659-3662)
- (pp 233-238)
- Mwetoolkit+sem: Integrating word embeddings in the mwetoolkit for semantic MWE processing. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016 (pp 1221-1225)
- (pp 306-318)
- Identification of multiword expressions in the brWaC. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 (pp 728-735)
- . Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2014 - October 2014.
- Comparing the quality of focused crawlers and of the translation resources obtained from them. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 (pp 3572-3578)
- Comparing similarity measures for distributional thesauri. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 (pp 2964-2971)
-
- Language acquisition and probabilistic models: Keeping it simple. ACL 2013 - 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 1 (pp 1321-1330)
- Introduction. Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Multiword Expressions, MWE 2013 - in conjunction with the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2013 (pp III-IV)
- A large scale annotated child language construction database. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012 (pp 2370-2374)
- Semi-automatic acquisition system of ontologies. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 776 (pp 189-194)
- Extraction and validation of ontologies from digital resources. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 776 (pp 183-188)
- Identification and treatment of multiword expressions applied to information retrieval. Workshop on Multiword Expressions: From Parsing and Generation to the Real World, MWE 2011 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings (pp 101-109)
- Fast and flexible MWE candidate generation with the MWE toolkit. Workshop on Multiword Expressions: From Parsing and Generation to the Real World, MWE 2011 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings (pp 134-136)
- Identifying and analyzing Brazilian portuguese complex predicates. Workshop on Multiword Expressions: From Parsing and Generation to the Real World, MWE 2011 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings (pp 74-82)
- Introduction. Workshop on Multiword Expressions: From Parsing and Generation to the Real World, MWE 2011 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, ACL-HLT 2011 - Proceedings (pp III-IV)
- (pp 65-74)
- (pp 173-182)
- Web-based and combined language models: A case study on noun compound identification. Coling 2010 - 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 2 (pp 1041-1049)
- Multiword expressions in the wild? the mwetoolkit comes in handy. Coling 2010 - 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 2 (pp 57-60)
- COMUNICA - A question answering system for brazilian portuguese. Coling 2010 - 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 2 (pp 21-24)
- An investigation on the influence of frequency on the lexical organization of verbs. ACL 2010 - TextGraphs 2010: 2010 Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop (pp 19-23)
- Mwetoolkit: A framework for multiword expression identification. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010 (pp 662-669)
- An investigation on the influence of frequency on the lexical organization of verbs. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp 19-23)
- . 2009 Seventh Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology, 8 September 2009 - 11 September 2009.
- . 2009 Seventh Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology, 8 September 2009 - 11 September 2009.
- . 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: Verb-particle constructions, noise and idiomaticity. CoNLL 2008 - Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (pp 49-56)
- . Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning - CoNLL '08, 16 August 2008 - 17 August 2008.
- UFRGS@CLEF2008: Indexing Multiword Expressions for Information Retrieval. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 1174
- Validation and evaluation of automatically acquired multiword expressions for grammar engineering. EMNLP-CoNLL 2007 - Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (pp 1034-1043)
- . Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties - MWE '06, 23 July 2006 - 23 July 2006.
- . Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions Integrating Processing - MWE '04, 26 July 2004 - 26 July 2004.
- A multilingual database of idioms. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2004 (pp 1127-1130)
- Multiword expressions: Linguistic precision and reusability. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2002 (pp 1941-1947)
- Extracting the Unextractable: A Case Study on Verb-particles. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Learning to Distinguish PP Arguments from Adjuncts. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- The acquisition of word order by a computational learning system. Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2000 and of the 2nd Learning Language in Logic Workshop, LLL 2000 - Held in cooperation with ICGI 2000 (pp 209-218)
- Representing a system of lexical types using default unification. 9th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 1999 (pp 261-264)
- (pp 302-311)
- (pp 323-332)
- An empirical study on cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation for efficient language model inference. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024. Miami, Florida, 12 November 2024 - 12 November 2024.
- Improving Tokenisation by Alternative Treatment of Spaces. Proceedings of the The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Effective Cross-Task Transfer Learning for Explainable Natural Language Inference with T5. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
- . Interspeech 2019
- . LatinX in AI at Neural Information Processing Systems Conference 2018
- . The 6th Intl. Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages
- Probing for idiomaticity in vector space models. Proceedings of the 16th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Investigating Language Impact in Bilingual Approaches for Computational Language Documentation. 1st Joint Workshop of Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (SLTU-CCURL 2020)
- Assessing Idiomaticity Representations in Vector Models with a Noun Compound Dataset Labeled at Type and Token Levels. Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- CogNLP-91Ö±²¥ at CMCL 2021 Shared Task: Blending Cognitively Inspired Features with Transformer-based Language Models for Predicting Eye Tracking Patterns. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2021)
Preprints
- Investigating Idiomaticity in Word Representations, arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- A Methodology for Explainable Large Language Models with Integrated Gradients and Linguistic Analysis in Text Classification, arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- Word Boundary Information Isn't Useful for Encoder Language Models, arXiv.
- Assessing Linguistic Generalisation in Language Models: A Dataset for Brazilian Portuguese, arXiv.
- , arXiv.
- Improving Tokenisation by Alternative Treatment of Spaces, arXiv.
- AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of
Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models.
- Investigating Language Impact in Bilingual Approaches for Computational
Language Documentation, arXiv.
- How Does Language Influence Documentation Workflow? Unsupervised Word
Discovery Using Translations in Multiple Languages, arXiv.
- Empirical Evaluation of Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Word Discovery
in Low-resource Settings, arXiv.
- A small Griko-Italian speech translation corpus, arXiv.
- Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Speech with Attention, arXiv.
- Unwritten Languages Demand Attention Too! Word Discovery with
Encoder-Decoder Models, arXiv.
- Enhancing the LexVec Distributed Word Representation Model Using
Positional Contexts and External Memory, arXiv.
- Matrix Factorization using Window Sampling and Negative Sampling for
Improved Word Representations, arXiv.
- .
- . Cambridge University Press.
- Grants
-
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
- , EPSRC, 12/2020 - 11/2024, £446,163, as PI
- Professional activities and memberships
-
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, , , and General co-chair for the (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 91Ö±²¥ and of the of the (Brazil).