André Martins, a researcher from Técnico and Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), was awarded a consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC), amounting to nearly €2 million, announced on 31st January the European organisation.

With the DECOLLAGE project, André Martins intends to present solutions to some of the fundamental problems of NLP, by using an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that brings together tools from artificial intelligence, sparse modelling, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences.

André Martins expects that this project will make it possible to “advance one step further in overcoming the limitations of current NLP technologies, making it possible for humans and machines to communicate effectively in natural language and to work collaboratively to solve increasingly harder problems”.

Although deep learning models for natural language processing already exist, they are often unreliable and even misleading – they do not generalize well to new domains and they do not exploit contextual information.

This is the second time that the Técnico professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI), wins an ERC grant. In 2017, André Martins won an ERC Grant of €1,4 million.

The European Research Council awarded 321 consolidator grants totalling €657 million in the last edition. These ERC grants are intended for researchers with seven to 12 years of experience after the completion of their doctoral degree. In addition to André Martins, two other Portuguese researchers were awarded the grant: Eugénia Chiappe, from the Champalimaud Foundation and Susana Viegas, from Universidade Nova de Lisboa.