Mirella Lapata

Mirella Lapata is a Professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, with visiting roles at the University of Washington and MIT. Her research focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, computational linguistics, and natural language generation. She has held academic positions since 2002, progressing from Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and University of Edinburgh to Reader (2007) and eventually Professor (2012).

Key awards include Fellowships from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2019) and ACL (2019), as well as the Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2018). She leads major grants such as the £6.8M UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing (2019) and the €1.9M ERC Consolidator Grant (2016).

Her work spans semantic parsing, neural networks, text generation, and machine learning applications. She has delivered keynote speeches at major conferences like ACL, EMNLP, and ICLR. Professional service roles include associate editorships for Royal Society Open Science and JAIR, and conference chairs for EACL and EMNLP.