Anabela Barreiro is a Senior Research Scientist and Language Technologist with an entrepreneurial spirit, dedicated to bridging human expertise and machine intelligence. She specializes in computational linguistics, with a focus on machine translation, paraphrasing, and multilingual text generation. Her work enhances the accuracy and semantic fidelity of AI-driven language processing systems, ensuring nuanced meanings are preserved across languages.
She has contributed to various cutting-edge research projects, notably in deep semantic transfer approaches for machine translation and paraphrasing systems that support text simplification and content adaptation. Her expertise bridges linguistic theory and AI applications, refining machine-generated text for greater naturalness and contextual accuracy.
A key milestone in her career was securing and leading COST Action Multi3Generation (CA18231), the first EU-funded project for INESC-ID’s Human Language Technologies (HLT) Group, which she helped establish by expanding the former Spoken Language Systems Laboratory (L2F). Running from 2019 to 2023, this initiative advanced multilingual, multimodal, and multitask natural language generation (NLG), strengthening the group’s international reputation and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.
Beyond research, Barreiro played a pivotal role in pioneering industrial machine translation (MT) adoption in Portugal, identifying key collaboration opportunities and integrating MT into the national landscape. She also launched the OpenLogos Language Model on GitHub, making a rule-based MT system openly accessible to researchers and developers worldwide.
Additionally, she is a strong advocate for the Chief Language Officer (CLO) role in AI, emphasizing the need for linguistic and cultural expertise in AI development. She champions the integration of language professionals to address bias, enhance inclusivity, and ensure ethical AI applications.
Through her research, industry leadership, and advocacy, Barreiro continues to shape the future of AI-driven language technologies, bridging the gap between human expertise and artificial intelligence.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anabelabarreiro