Iria is our newest computational linguist, she will be working on data annotation and development for on-going projects. Having started her career at the University of Santiago de Compostela with a PhD in Linguistics, she has worked in academia and industry, developing NLP resources and tools, diving into linguistic data to extract the most from it.
Who has influenced you most when it comes to how you approach your work?
Several people along with my career, but the first who came to my mind was my supervisor for a short research stay in the Netherlands (whilst doing my PhD). He was a physicist working on Information Retrieval and NLP, very interested in languages and syntax. He was the first computer scientist I worked with (and struggled with), and his ideas about trying to make complex things, like language, simpler strongly influenced my way of thinking. He was also very passionate about what he did, and I love that.
What was your first job?
Shop assistant in a store, selling clothes, when I was a teenager (I found it very boring).
What are you looking forward to most about working for Aveni?
Learning a lot from my peers about how to implement efficiently amazing applications that deal with natural language.
If you could snap your fingers and become an expert at something what would it be?
Just one thing? Hum… hard… I would love to be a musician. A pianist.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given and who was it from?
Enjoy what you do because time flies like an arrow. My mother.
