Hi there! My name is Laura and I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland, supervised by Lonneke van der Plas. Previously, I did my PhD at the The University of Manchester within the National Centre of Text Mining (NaCTeM) supervised by Prof. Sophia Ananiadou and co-supervised by Nhung T.H. Nguyen, Matthew Shardlow and Piotr Przybyła. My main of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Text Simplification and Multilinguality in the HR domain. Before that, I worked in the industry as a Software Engineer at Intel Costa Rica.

News

• Aug 12th, 2023: Paper accepted at the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2023) at RANLP 2023: “Document-level Text Simplification with Coherence Evaluation”

• June 22nd, 2023: I’ve successfully defended my PhD thesis! :)

• Oct 7th, 2022: Paper accepted at the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022) at EMNLP 2022: “A Benchmark for Neural Readability Assessment of Texts in Spanish”

• Sep 30th, 2022: The UoM&MMU team (@lmvasquezr, @nguyenthnhung, @MattShardlow and @SAnaniadou) participated on the TSAR-2022 Shared Task “Lexical Simplification for English, Portuguese and Spanish”. We placed 2nd among the 8 participating teams in Spanish and 3rd among the 15 participating teams in English. You can check our paper here.

• May 31th, 2022: Accepted for the 12th Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS 2022) :)

• May 6th, 2022: Selected as a finalist for the UoM Three Minute Thesis Competition 2022.

• Mar 14th, 2022: Participated in the first Spanish NLP Hackathon.

• Jul 21th, 2021: Paper accepted at CTTS 2021 Workshop: The Role of Text Simplification Operations in Evaluation

• Jun 7th, 2021: Received the Associate Fellow recognition of Advance HE from the University of Manchester

• May 6th, 2021: Paper accepted at ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Findings: “Investigating Text Simplification Evaluation”