Mirella Lapata

Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, working on extracting semantic information from large bodies of text and developing algorithms and models for natural language processing. She earned a Master of Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, where her research on acquiring information from polysemous linguistic units using probabilistic methods was supervised by Alex Lascarides, Chris Brew and Steve Finch. In 2009 she became the first recipient of the BCS and Information Retrieval Specialist Group's Karen Sparck Jones award, and later received an ERC Consolidator Grant, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and a UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Academia Europaea, and won the BCS Lovelace Medal.