Research

My research interests are in natural language processing, machine translation, information retrieval, language and multimodal resources, and the evaluation of linguistic and interactive systems.

My articles can be found on my publication list or my Google Scholar profile.  My recent research projects include:

  • INTERCOM (Interprétation communautaire automatique de langues peu dotées : données, systèmes, évaluation) supported by HES-SO, with Bhaasha SàRL (2024)
  • SECTOR (Self-hosted AI Coding Tools: Review and Prototype) supported by Armasuisse (2024)
  • DOMAT (On-demand Knowledge for Document-level Machine Translation) supported by the SNSF (2018-2023), continued by EXOMAT SNSF (2024-2025)
  • UNISUB (Unsupervised NMT with innovative multilingual subword models) supported by Armasuisse (2022-2023)
  • Decrypt (Décrypter les perturbations prosodiques pour améliorer l’apprentissage de la communication) supported by InnoSuisse (with TALK Sàrl) (2021)
  • Digital Lyric (Création Poétique Assistée par Ordinateur, et Anthologies Numériques Personnalisables) supported by the SNSF Agora program (main applicant: University of Lausanne) (2019-2020)

Previously, I have been the leader of the MODERN SNSF Sinergia project (2013-2017) on Modeling Discourse Entities and Relations for Coherent Machine Translation, which followed the COMTIS Sinergia project (2010-2013), on Improving the Coherence of Machine Translation Output by Modeling Intersentential Relations. I have been involved in the IM2 NCCR from its start to its end (2002-2013), working on dialogue processing, data management and HCI, as head or deputy head of two individual projects. I have contributed to the SUMMA EU project (2016-2017), as well as to the inEvent European project (2011-2014), and to the AMIDA European integrated project (2007-2010) as head of a work package on interfaces and evaluation.

Recent articles

  1. Vernikos G. & Popescu-Belis A. (2024) – Don’t Rank, Combine! Combining Machine Translation Hypotheses Using Quality Estimation. arXiv:2401.06688, 19 pages.
  2. Wolleb B., Silvestri R., Vernikos G., Dolamic L., & Popescu-Belis A. (2023) – Assessing the Importance of Frequency versus Compositionality for Subword-based Tokenization in NMT. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), Tampere, Finland, 10 p.
  3. Atrio A.R., Allemann A., Dolamic L., & Popescu-Belis A. (2023) – A Simplified Training Pipeline for Low-resource and Unsupervised Machine Translation. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT), EACL, Dubrovnik, Croatia, p. 47-58.
  4. Popescu-Belis A., Atrio A.R., Bernath B., Boisson E., Ferrari T., Theimer-Lienhard X., & Vernikos G. (2023) – GPoeT: a Language Model Trained for Rhyme Generation on Synthetic Data. Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL), EACL, Dubrovnik, Croatia, p. 10-20.
  5. Atrio A.R. & Popescu-Belis A. (2022) – On the Interaction of Regularization Factors in Low-resource Neural Machine Translation. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), Ghent, Belgium, p. 111-120
  6. Popescu-Belis A., Atrio A.R., Minder V., Xanthos A., Luthier G., Mattei S., & Rodriguez A. (2022) – Constrained Language Models for Interactive Poem Generation. Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Marseille, France, p. 3519–3529.

Recent talks

  1. Popescu-Belis A. (2024) – Modèles de langage, modèles d’intelligence ? Invited talk at Ludovia CH 2024, Yverdon-les-Bains, 23 avril 2024.
  2. Allemann A., Popescu-Belis A., Chapuis B., Krishnamani G. & Krishnamani K. (2024) – Low-resource Spoken Translation Pipeline for SMEs. Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD), EPFL, Lausanne, 26 March 2024.
  3. Popescu-Belis A. (2023) – Intelligence artificielle et correction grammaticale. Invited talk for ARCI (Association Romande des Correcteurs d’Imprimerie) and ACLF (Association des Correcteurs de Langue Française), 7 December 2023.
  4. Popescu-Belis A. (2023) – ChatGPT entre fascination et réalisme. Interview for Pédagoscope (le podcast de l’enseignement supérieur), 24 February 2023.
  5. Popescu-Belis A., Xanthos A., Minder V., Atrio À. R., Luthier G., and Rodriguez A. (2020) – Interactive Poem Generation: when Language Models support Human Creativity. Presentation at the 5th Swiss Text Analytics and 16th KONVENS Conference (SwissText-KONVENS 2020), Zurich, Switzerland.