Cristina España i Bonet

At this moment I'm a member of the Computer Science Department (CS) from UPC. Within the Natural Language Processing group (NLPG) I have worked with Drs. Lluís Màrquez, Jesús Giménez, Meritxell Gonzàlez and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño. Part of my work revolves around Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). I have been working on SMT translation between Arabic and English using disambiguation methods that complement the frequentist selection of the translated fragments with discriminative learning. We have also designed specialized hybrid systems for translating patents and generic systems that combine statistical methods with rule-based methods to tackle the translation between Spanish and Basque. Within another research line, we explore translation at document level and how the elements of discourse can help to improve the consistency of translations. In recent years, I have also worked in retrieval and multilingual systems. In all these areas I have dealt with distant types of texts such as news, patents, Wikipedia articles or tweets.

On the other hand, most of my research in cosmology has been carried out in the Departament d'Astronomia i Meteorologia from the UB (DAM). At DAM I belonged to the Supernovae and Cosmology group leaded by Dr. Ramon Canal. With my thesis supervisor, Dr. Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente, I applied mathematical methods to the reconstruction of continuous functions, the dark energy equation of state in our case. The most theoretical part and the basis of my thesis are done in collaboration with Dr. Joan Solà from the Departament d'Estructura i Constituents de la Matèria, with whom I explored the observational possibility that the cosmological constant is in fact evolving with time, and that it is the source of the dark energy causing the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Finally, a research stay at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) from the University of Portsmouth allowed me to work with Prof. Bob Nichol. At the ICG, I studied the consequences of obtaining photometric redshifts instead of measuring the spectroscopic ones in supernovae surveys into the determination of the cosmological parameters. As a member of an observational group, I also worked but to a less extent on type Ia supernovae data reduction and analysis.