Aline Villavicencio, University of Sheffield

Statement

Natural Language Processing has an ever increasing presence in the technologies for our daily lives, and these advances are in large part due to the language resources available. The role of ELRA, through its supported initiatives and events, like the LREC conferences, has been crucial in promoting the development and sharing of language resources and exchange of best-practices.

If elected to the ELRA board, I would like to contribute to the crucial role of the association, particularly in strengthening the links with various active but less represented communities, for a continued growth of the language resources map with diversity. Actions for an increasingly diverse language resource profile include supporting and promoting (sub)events for low-resource languages and indigenous languages as part of the ELRA supported conferences. Moreover, building on my own experience with interdisciplinary collaboration and community building, where advances are strongly linked with resource sharing, I would also work towards continuing to expand the growth of the language resources to those from related disciplines, while also supporting multidisciplinary (sub)-events for further strengthening the collaborations among the communities.

If elected I also want to contribute to supporting the Language Resources and Evaluation journal in its mission, by actions such as helping to increase the diversity of the reviewer pool to include reviewers from related disciplines and from additional language communities.

BIO

Aline Villavicencio is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (UK). Prior to that she was affiliated to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and to the University of Essex (UK). Her research interests include multiword expressions, multilinguality, and cognitively motivated NLP. She received her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge (UK), and held postdoc positions at the University of Cambridge and University of Essex (UK) and was a Visiting Scholar at institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and École Normale Supérieure (France). She serves as editorial board member for TACL, JNLE, Journal of Language Modelling and Linguamatica, as well as Book Review Editor for Computational Linguistics. She was the PC co-chair of ACL-2022, of CoNLL-2019, General co-chair for the 13th Int. Conf. on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2018), and has been SAC and AC for events including *ACL conferences, IJCAI and AAAI. In addition, she co-chaired numerous *ACL workshops on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition and on Multiword Expressions, and co-edited special issues and books dedicated to these topics. She is also a member of the advisory board of WiNLP.

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