Popescu-Belis Andrei

Popescu-Belis Andrei serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), specifically within the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT) at HEIG-VD campus in Yverdon-les-Bains. His academic work spans teaching computer science fundamentals and advanced natural language processing concepts across both undergraduate and graduate programs.

His research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, and Human-Machine Dialogue systems, with particular emphasis on low-resource language scenarios. His work addresses challenges in speech-to-speech translation, subword tokenization, neural machine translation optimization, and creative applications like poem generation. Recent publications through 2025 demonstrate his ongoing contributions to the field, particularly in multilingual NMT training schedules and low-resource language processing pipelines.

Analysis of his 15 most recent publications reveals consistent focus on practical solutions for language barriers, with increasing attention to reinforcement learning applications and creative language generation. His work on GPoeT demonstrates the intersection of traditional literary forms with modern language models, while his research on low-resource translation pipelines addresses real-world community interpreting needs.

He has led significant research projects including Digital Lyric (2019-2020), a collaboration with UNIL (University of Lausanne) to develop systems for aiding poem generation for a public exhibition at Morges Castle. This project demonstrates his interdisciplinary approach bridging computational linguistics with creative applications.

His academic contributions include:

• Development of specialized training pipelines for low-resource neural machine translation
• Innovative approaches to speech-to-speech translation for community interpreting
• Novel methods for constrained language model applications in creative writing
• Significant contributions to understanding subword tokenization mechanics

Popescu-Belis maintains active research collaborations across institutions, as evidenced by his work with UNIL and various international conference publications. His teaching portfolio includes courses in natural language processing, data preparation, unsupervised machine learning, and computer science fundamentals, demonstrating his commitment to both theoretical and practical aspects of the field.