I am a PhD student in Software Engineering at FEUP under FCT scholarship SFRH/BD/23590/2005, and I am a member of the NIAD&R team. I am being supervised by Prof. Eugénio de Oliveira.
My research is related to studying and developing methods for measuring semantic similarity (or dissimilarity) between words (names and verbs) or concepts (identified by noun phases or names). The goal of this research is being able to use such semantic information for helping to build more powerful semi-supervised methods for NLP/IE tasks. Basically, we would like to be able to define the behavior of complex NLP/IE systems by only describing a small set of cases / examples. Ideally, by knowing how to measure semantic similarity between words and concepts, the system would be able to extrapolate such examples, and operate autonomously in a wide variety of unseen cases.
For example, when annotating names in text, we would like to give only a few examples of how such names could be tagged, and have then system find all "similar" situations (maybe learning new words / names and semantic relations on the way).
Apart from being a PhD student (which does not leave to much time for other activities) I try to develop some other fun projects, and, whenever the weather is nice, I try to stand on a surf-board.
Other things I did (before starting or while doing my PhD):
- Internship at Google @ NY (June 2007 to November 2007)
- Researcher at Linguateca@Porto (October 2002 to December 2005)
- Assistant Lecturer at the DEEC-FEUP (October 2003 to October 2005)
- Assistant Lecturer at the EA-UCP-Porto (October 1999 to August 2002)
- Internship at INESC-Porto (October 1997 to September 1998)
For some more detailed information, here is my CV in English and Portuguese.
You can also drop me a line at las at fe.up.pt.