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Fernando Alva Manchego

Dr Fernando Alva Manchego

(he/him)

Lecturer

School of Computer Science and Informatics

Email
AlvaManchegoF@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29225 14738
Campuses
Abacws, Room Room 4.64, Senghennydd Road, Cathays, Cardiff, CF24 4AG
Users
Available for postgraduate supervision

Overview

I am a Lecturer (~Assistant Professor) at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University. My research focuses on technologies that apply Artificial Intelligence for information accessibility. In particular, my work employs Natural Language Processing approaches to facilitate reading and understanding. I am especially interested in studying the real capabilities of systems for several Natural Language Generartion tasks, such as Machine Translation, Summarisation and Text Simplification. In order to do that, my collaborators and I create language resources, design evaluation methodologies or metrics, and implement models using machine learning techniques.

My research interests include:

  • Text-to-Text Generation (e.g. Text Simplification, Summarisation, Translation Machine, etc.)
  • Evaluation of Natural Language Generation
  • Writing Assistance
  • Natural Language Processing for Education

Publication

2023

2022

  • Ushio, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Camacho Collados, J. 2022. Generative language models for paragraph-level question generation. Presented at: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 7-11 December 2022 Presented at Goldberg, Y., Kozareva, Z. and Zhang, Y. eds.Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 670-688., (10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.42)
  • Vasquez-Rodriguez, L., Cuenca-Jimenez, P., Morales-Esquivel, S. and Alva Manchego, F. 2022. A benchmark for neural readability assessment of texts in Spanish. Presented at: Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual), 8 December 2022Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 188-198.
  • Miliani, M., Auriemma, S., Alva Manchego, F. and Lenci, A. 2022. Neural readability pairwise ranking for sentences in Italian administrative language. Presented at: 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Online only, 20-23 November 2022Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Vol. 1. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 849-866.
  • Murrugarra-Llerena, J., Alva Manchego, F. and Murrugarra-LLerena, N. 2022. Improving embeddings representations for comparing higher education curricula: A use case in computing. Presented at: 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7-11 December 2022 Presented at Goldberg, Y., Kozareva, Z. and Zhang, Y. eds.Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 11299–11307., (10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.776)
  • Bejarano, G., Huamani-Malca, J., Cerna-Herrera, F., Alva Manchego, F. and Rivas, P. 2022. PeruSIL: A framework to build a continuous Peruvian Sign Language interpretation dataset. Presented at: LREC2022: 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources, Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022 Presented at Efthimiou, E. et al. eds.Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources. European Language Resources Association pp. 1-8.
  • Shardlow, M. and Alva Manchego, F. 2022. Simple TICO-19: A dataset for joint translation and simplification of COVID-19 texts. Presented at: LREC 2022: Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022 Presented at Calzolari, N. et al. eds.Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association pp. 3093–3102.
  • Alva Manchego, F. and Shardlow, M. 2022. Towards readability-controlled machine translation of COVID-19 texts. Presented at: 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, Ghent, Belgium, 1-3 June 2022 Presented at Moniz, H. et al. eds.Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. European Association for Machine Translation pp. 287–288.

2021

2020

2019

  • Alva Manchego, F., Martin, L., Scarton, C. and Specia, L. 2019. EASSE: Easier Automatic Sentence Simplification Evaluation. Presented at: 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 3-7 November 2019 Presented at Pado, S. and Huang, R. eds.Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 49-54., (10.18653/v1/D19-3009)
  • Finnimore, P., Fritzsch, E., King, D., Sneyd, A., Ur Rehman, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Vlachos, A. 2019. Strong baselines for complex word identification across multiple languages. Presented at: 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019), 2-7 June 2019 Presented at Burstein, J., Doran, C. and Solorio, T. eds.Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 970-977., (10.18653/v1/N19-1102)

2016

2012

  • Alva Manchego, F. E. and Rosa, J. L. G. 2012. Towards semi-supervised Brazilian Portuguese semantic role labeling: Building a benchmark. Presented at: PROPOR: International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, 17-20 April 2012 Presented at Caseli, H. et al. eds.Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language: 10th International Conference, PROPOR 2012, Coimbra, Portugal, April 17-20, 2012. Proceedings, Vol. 7243. Springer pp. 210-217., (10.1007/978-3-642-28885-2_24)
  • Alva Manchego, F. E. and Rosa, J. L. G. 2012. Semantic role labeling for Brazilian Portuguese: A benchmark. Presented at: Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2012, 13-16 November 2012 Presented at Pavon, J., Duque-Mendez, N. D. and Fuentes-Fernandez, R. eds.Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2012: 13th Ibero-American Conference on AI, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, November 13-16, 2012. Proceedings, Vol. 7637. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Springer pp. 481-490., (10.1007/978-3-642-34654-5_49)

Articles

Conferences

  • Kew, T., Chi, A., Vásquez-Rodríguez, L., Agrawal, S., Aumiller, D., Alva Manchego, F. and Shardlow, M. 2023. BLESS: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Sentence Simplification. Presented at: 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 6-10 December 2023Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. ACL pp. 13291–13309., (10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.821)
  • Ushio, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Camacho-Collados, J. 2023. An empirical comparison of LM-based question and answer generation methods. Presented at: The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9-14 July 2023Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023. Toronto, Canada: Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 14262-14272., (10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.899)
  • Ushio, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Camacho-Collados, J. 2023. A practical toolkit for multilingual question and answer generation. Presented at: 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9-14 July 2023Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, Vol. 3. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 86-94., (10.18653/v1/2023.acl-demo.8)
  • Ushio, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Camacho Collados, J. 2022. Generative language models for paragraph-level question generation. Presented at: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 7-11 December 2022 Presented at Goldberg, Y., Kozareva, Z. and Zhang, Y. eds.Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 670-688., (10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.42)
  • Vasquez-Rodriguez, L., Cuenca-Jimenez, P., Morales-Esquivel, S. and Alva Manchego, F. 2022. A benchmark for neural readability assessment of texts in Spanish. Presented at: Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual), 8 December 2022Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 188-198.
  • Miliani, M., Auriemma, S., Alva Manchego, F. and Lenci, A. 2022. Neural readability pairwise ranking for sentences in Italian administrative language. Presented at: 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Online only, 20-23 November 2022Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Vol. 1. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 849-866.
  • Murrugarra-Llerena, J., Alva Manchego, F. and Murrugarra-LLerena, N. 2022. Improving embeddings representations for comparing higher education curricula: A use case in computing. Presented at: 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 7-11 December 2022 Presented at Goldberg, Y., Kozareva, Z. and Zhang, Y. eds.Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 11299–11307., (10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.776)
  • Bejarano, G., Huamani-Malca, J., Cerna-Herrera, F., Alva Manchego, F. and Rivas, P. 2022. PeruSIL: A framework to build a continuous Peruvian Sign Language interpretation dataset. Presented at: LREC2022: 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources, Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022 Presented at Efthimiou, E. et al. eds.Proceedings of the LREC2022 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources. European Language Resources Association pp. 1-8.
  • Shardlow, M. and Alva Manchego, F. 2022. Simple TICO-19: A dataset for joint translation and simplification of COVID-19 texts. Presented at: LREC 2022: Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022 Presented at Calzolari, N. et al. eds.Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. European Language Resources Association pp. 3093–3102.
  • Alva Manchego, F. and Shardlow, M. 2022. Towards readability-controlled machine translation of COVID-19 texts. Presented at: 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, Ghent, Belgium, 1-3 June 2022 Presented at Moniz, H. et al. eds.Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation. European Association for Machine Translation pp. 287–288.
  • Alva-Manchego, F., Obamuyide, A., Gajbhiye, A., Blain, F., Fomicheva, M. and Specia, L. 2021. deepQuest-py: large and distilled models for quality estimation. Presented at: 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 7-11 November 2021 Presented at Adel, H. and Shi, S. eds.Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 382-389., (10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.42)
  • Rivas Rojas, K. and Alva-Manchego, F. 2021. IAPUCP at SemEval-2021 task 1: Stacking fine-tuned transformers is almost all you need for lexical complexity prediction. Presented at: 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2021), Virtual, 05-06 August 2021 Presented at Palmer, A. et al. eds.Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 144-149., (10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.14)
  • Maddela, M., Alva-Manchego, F. and Xu, W. 2021. Controllable text simplification with explicit paraphrasing. Presented at: 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Virtual, 06-11 June 2021Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 3536-3553., (10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.277)
  • Gajbhiye, A., Fomicheva, M., Alva-Manchego, F., Blain, F., Obamuyide, A., Aletras, N. and Specia, L. 2021. Knowledge distillation for quality estimation. Presented at: 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021), Bangkok, Thailand, 1-6 August 2021 Presented at Zong, C. et al. eds.Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 5091-5099., (10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.452)
  • Alva Manchego, F., Martin, L., Bordes, A., Scarton, C., Sagot, B. and Specia, L. 2020. ASSET: A dataset for tuning and evaluation of sentence simplification models with multiple rewriting transformations. Presented at: ACL 2020: 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Presented at Jurafsky, D. et al. eds.Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL pp. 4688-4679., (10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.424)
  • Alva Manchego, F., Martin, L., Scarton, C. and Specia, L. 2019. EASSE: Easier Automatic Sentence Simplification Evaluation. Presented at: 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 3-7 November 2019 Presented at Pado, S. and Huang, R. eds.Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 49-54., (10.18653/v1/D19-3009)
  • Finnimore, P., Fritzsch, E., King, D., Sneyd, A., Ur Rehman, A., Alva Manchego, F. and Vlachos, A. 2019. Strong baselines for complex word identification across multiple languages. Presented at: 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019), 2-7 June 2019 Presented at Burstein, J., Doran, C. and Solorio, T. eds.Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics pp. 970-977., (10.18653/v1/N19-1102)
  • Alva Manchego, F. E. and Rosa, J. L. G. 2012. Towards semi-supervised Brazilian Portuguese semantic role labeling: Building a benchmark. Presented at: PROPOR: International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, 17-20 April 2012 Presented at Caseli, H. et al. eds.Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language: 10th International Conference, PROPOR 2012, Coimbra, Portugal, April 17-20, 2012. Proceedings, Vol. 7243. Springer pp. 210-217., (10.1007/978-3-642-28885-2_24)
  • Alva Manchego, F. E. and Rosa, J. L. G. 2012. Semantic role labeling for Brazilian Portuguese: A benchmark. Presented at: Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2012, 13-16 November 2012 Presented at Pavon, J., Duque-Mendez, N. D. and Fuentes-Fernandez, R. eds.Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2012: 13th Ibero-American Conference on AI, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, November 13-16, 2012. Proceedings, Vol. 7637. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Springer pp. 481-490., (10.1007/978-3-642-34654-5_49)

Biography

I joined the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University in January 2022.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Natural Language Processing Group (2020-2021). I worked with Prof. Lucia Specia for the APE-QUEST (EU CEF Integration Project) and Bergamot (EU's Horizon 2020) projects on Quality Estimation for Machine Translation.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield focused on Automatic Text Simplification. My thesis title was: " Automatic Sentence Simplification with Multiple Rewriting Transformations". I was supervised by Prof. Lucia Specia and Dr. Carolina Scarton.

Before that, I worked as Adjunct Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (2013-2016), where I was a member of the  Artificial Intelligence Group IA-PUCP. During my Masters, I was also a member of the Interinstitutional Center for Computational Linguistics at the  University of São Paulo.

Supervisions

I am interested in supervising PhD students in projects involving Natural Language Processing for Text Adaptation.

Please, check the relevant pages in FindAPhD for more information, depending on whether you are a self-funded student, or plan on applying to a School scholarhip. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!

Current supervision

Abdullah Barayan

Abdullah Barayan

Research student

Abdullah Alshatti

Abdullah Alshatti

Research student

Specialisms

  • AI
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Natural language processing
  • Computational linguistics