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Ricardo Rei

Senior Research Scientist
Unbabel, Instituto Superior Técnico, INESC-ID
ricardo.rei (at) tecnico.ulisboa.pt


About Me

My name is Ricardo Rei, and I am a Senior Research Scientist at Unbabel, where I focus on research in multilingual Large Language Models (LLM) and Machine Translation. Recently, I completed my PhD at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, earning the distinction of Summa cum laude for my work on Machine Translation evaluation. This doctoral journey was part of a collaborative program between Unbabel, IST, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), known as Multilingual AI Agents Assistants (MAIA).

During my PhD, I was under the guidance of Alon Lavie from CMU and Luísa Coheur from IST. While the primary focus of my thesis was Machine Translation Evaluation, my academic journey also involved exploring other areas within Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as decoding, uncertainty and efficient NLP.

Beyond academia, I have a passion for sports and I am an avid surfer 🏄‍♂️. Currently, I split my time between London and Lisbon.

Recent News

• June 2024: Keynote at First International Workshop on Knowledge-Enhanced Machine Translation
• Feb 2024: We released 🗼 TowerLLM: An Open LLM for Translation-Related Tasks

Selected Publications

  1. arXiv 2024
    TowerLLM: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks
    Duarte M. Alves, José Pombal, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Pedro H. Martins, João Alves, Amin Farajian, Ben Peters, Ricardo Rei, Patrick Fernandes, Sweta Agrawal, Pierre Colombo, José G.C. de Souza, André F.T. Martins
    PDF Code
  2. ACL 23
    The Inside Story: Towards Better Understanding of Machine Translation Neural Evaluation Metrics
    Ricardo Rei, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Marcos Treviso, André F.T. Martins
    Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023.
    PDF Code
  3. NAACL 22
    Quality-Aware Decoding for Neural Machine Translation
    Patrick Fernandes, António Farinhas, Ricardo Rei, José G. C. de Souza, Perez Ogayo, Graham Neubig, Andre Martins
    Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL), 2022.
    PDF Code Video
  4. EAMT 22
    Searching for Cometinho: The Little Metric That Could
    Ricardo Rei, Ana C Farinha, José G.C. de Souza, Pedro G. Ramos, André F.T. Martins, Luisa Coheur, Alon Lavie
    Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), 2022.
    PDF Code Video
  5. EMNLP 20
    COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation
    Ricardo Rei, Craig Stewart, Ana C Farinha, Alon Lavie
    2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
    PDF Code Video

Past News

• December 2023: 🏆 xCOMET got first place on the WMT 23 Metrics Shared Task,
• Oct 2023 : Paper accepted at WMT 23 (shared task paper)
• Oct 2023 : Paper accepted at EMNLP 2023 (findings)
• June 2023: Keynote at Machine Translation Marathon in the Americas,
• May 2023 : Our paper “The Inside Story” was accepted at ACL 2023 (main)
• Sep 2022 : Invited lecture at Fifteenth Machine Translation Marathon, Prague
• Aug 2022 : Led the winning submission to the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Quality Estimation held at EMNLP 2022
• Aug 2022 : Paper accepted at EMNLP 2022 (main)
• Aug 2022 : 🎉 Received EAMT 2022 Best paper award!
• May 2022 : For the next 3 months I’ll be visiting CMU!
• May 2022 : Paper accepted at EAMT 2022 (research track)
• Apr 2022 : Paper accepted at NAACL 2022 (main)
• Nov 2021 : Panel discussion on evaluation held at WMT
• Oct 2021 : Collaborated on the winning submission to the Eval4NLP Explainable Quality Estimation Shared Task held at EMNLP 2021
• Aug 2021 : Paper accepted at EMNLP 2021 (main)
• May 2021 : 2 papers accepted at ACL 2021 (one long and another demo)
• Sep 2020 : Paper accepted at EMNLP 2020 (main)
• Sep 2020 : Started my PhD at Instituto Superior Técnico, supervised by Luisa Coheur and Alon Lavie