Mirella Lapata

Lapata obtained a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.^[4] Lapata's doctoral research investigated the acquisition of information from polysemous linguistic units using probabilistic methods supervised by Alex Lascarides, Chris Brew and Steve Finch.^[2]

After her doctorate, Lapata assumed academic positions at Saarland University and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.^[4][5] At the University of Edinburgh she became a reader in the School of Informatics where she is a full Professor and holds a personal chair in natural language processing.^[6] Lapata is a member of the Human Communication Research Center and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, both in Edinburgh.^[7]

Between 2015 and 2017, Lapata served as a member of the Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group.^[8] Recently^[when?] Lapata was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth €1.9M to fund five years of her project, TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text.^[9]

• In 2009 Lapata became the first recipient of the Microsoft British Computer Society (BCS)/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award.^[10] The award recognises achievement in furthering the progress in information retrieval and natural language processing; the award commemorates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones.
• In 2012 Lapata won an Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-CoNLL 2012 Best Reviewer Award.^[11]
• In 2018 Lapata was awarded, alongside Li Dong, an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Best Paper Honorable Mention.^[12]
• In 2019 Lapata was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh^[13]
• In 2020 Lapata was elected to the Academia Europaea.^[14]
• In 2025 Lapata was awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal for Computing Research.^[15]