Alon Lavie

Dr. Alon Lavie is a Consulting Professor at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) within Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he has been a faculty member since 1996. He previously served as a Research Professor at CMU from 1996 to 2015. Lavie is also currently the VP of AI Research at Phrase, leading AI R&D teams across Pittsburgh, Prague, and Edinburgh. His work bridges academic research and industrial application in machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP).

• Academic Affiliations: CMU (Consulting Professor, 1996–present), Unbabel (VP of Language Technologies, 2015–2019), Amazon (Senior Manager, 2015–2019)
• Industry Roles: Co-founded Safaba Translation Solutions (2009–2015), acquired by Amazon

Research Interests: Lavie’s research focuses on Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing, particularly syntax-driven and hybrid approaches to MT, human feedback integration, and evaluation metrics. His projects include:

• AVENUE/LETRAS: Developing MT systems for minority languages (Mapudungun, Quechua, Inupiaq).
• METEOR: Leading the decade-long development of this highly correlated MT evaluation metric.
• COMET: Directed development of a neural MT evaluation metric at Unbabel.
• MEMT: Pioneering multi-engine MT combination frameworks.
• GRASP: Robust parsing of grammatical relations in spoken language corpora.

Scientific Awards: Recipient of the 2021 Makoto Nagao IAMT Award of Honour for contributions to MT. Former president of the International Association for Machine Translation (2013–2015) and Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (2008–2012).

Advising & Leadership: Supervised 23 graduate students, including PhD recipients Ricardo Rei (2024) and Austin Matthews (2019). Served as General Chair for AMTA 2010/2012, MT Summit 2015, and as president of ACL’s SIGParse (2008–2013).