Aline Villavicencio

Professor Aline Villavicencio is a Chair in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield's School of Computer Science. She holds a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge and an MSc from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). Her research focuses on lexical semantics, multilinguality, and cognitively motivated NLP, with applications including Multiword Expression (MWE) treatment and text simplification for English and Portuguese. She has held a CNPq Research Fellowship (2007–2017) and currently leads projects like Modeling Idiomaticity in Human and Artificial Language Processing (EPSRC grant).

Her roles include PC co-chair for CoNLL-2019, Area Chair for ACL-2019 and NAACL-2018, and co-chair of PROPOR 2018. She advises WiNLP, contributes to TACL, JNLE, and other journals, and collaborates with the Neurocomputational and Language Processing Lab in Brazil. Notable work includes corpus development (e.g., BRWAC for Brazilian Portuguese), idiomaticity detection, and cross-lingual transfer learning. Recent grants include £446k from EPSRC and £370k from Horizon Europe (Atrium).

• Key Projects: Modeling Idiomaticity, Cross-lingual Adaptation, Speech Segmentation
• Grants: EPSRC (£446k), Horizon Europe (£370k), Royal Society (£74k)
• Publications: Over 100 papers in ACL, EMNLP, and journals like Natural Language Engineering.

Her lab work involves developing NLP tools for under-resourced languages and exploring neural models' limitations in idiomatic understanding. She co-edited books on cognitive aspects of language acquisition and MWE processing, and her teaching includes advanced NLP modules.