Luísa Coheur

From HLT@INESC-ID

Luísa Coheur was born in Lisbon, is married and has three children. She holds a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and a Ph.D. from IST and Université Blaise-Pascal in the field of Natural Language Processing. In 2023, she completed a one-year postgraduate program in "Higher Education Pedagogy," offered by the Institute of Education at the University of Lisbon. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and a Researcher at INESC-ID, in the "Human Language Technologies" group. Her preferred research topics focus on Dialogue Systems, Question/Answer, and Machine Translation (including for Portuguese Sign Language). She has supervised over 80 master's theses and 10 doctoral students (some of whom named their daughters Luísa). She was a member of the Management Committee of IST-Taguspark (20-23), being responsible for the beautiful library and pedagogical organization. She has participated in 17 projects, both national and international, has more than 120 peer-reviewed articles published, and has been recognized as an Excellent Professor more than 20 times according to the IST QUC classification. In 2023, she was recognized with the IST Outstanding Teaching Award from IST's Pedagogic Council. Luísa Coheur loves teaching and is passionate about good stories. She has few certainties in life, but there are three things she firmly believes in: 1) a motivated student can work wonders; 2) with hard work, we can overcome our limitations (not that she has any); 3) we can do very serious and rigorous work and still be extremely fun. Therefore, she tries to make each class and each article good stories and introduces playful elements and narratives in teaching whenever they make sense (which is often). Virtual escape games and characters like Inspector Morcela and Karen help her convey knowledge in her classes. She won a pedagogical innovation project in 2019 with a physical "Escape Game" on the Taguspark campus, which ran that year for the Logic for Programming course and later, with the help of her colleague Ana Moura Santos, for Linear Algebra (students had to solve challenges related to these subjects to "escape").When she has time (unfortunately almost never), she writes. She has three books and two (non-scientific) short stories published, with two of them receiving awards. She is restoring what she considers to be a true palace in Ferreira do Zêzere, proudly embracing roles as a bricklayer, carpenter, etc., on weekends. She considers herself an expert in plasterboard, OSB boards, and hydraulic lime.

Dialogue systems, Machine Translation, Question/Answer

 

Total Publications: 150

Article (Author)

In Proceedings (Author)

In Book (Author)

Proceedings (Editor)

Book (Editor)

Technical Report (Author)

Thesis (Author)

 

Total Supervisions: 99

Doctoral Theses

  • Exploiting Persona Information for Consistent Dialog Systems
    Rui Orlando Magalhães Ribeiro
    Joao P. Carvalho (advisor), Luísa Coheur (advisor),
    Doctoral Thesis, Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2021-02-24 - Ongoing
  • Natural language generation and evaluation in multilingual conversation
    Ricardo Rei
    Alon Lavie (advisor), Luísa Coheur (advisor),
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2020-09-01 - 2024-04-10
  • Deep semantic similarity through graph matching
    Pedro Fialho
    Paulo Quaresma (advisor), Luísa Coheur (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Universidade de Évora, 2012-04-01 - 2023-06-06
  • Best of All Worlds for Low-resource Natural Language Processing
    Vânia Mendonça
    Luísa Coheur (advisor), Alberto Sardinha (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2016-03-01 - 2022-07-01
  • Learning Semantic Patterns for Question Generation
    Hugo Rodrigues
    Luísa Coheur (advisor), Eric Nyberg (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2012-09-01 - 2020-12-01
  • Interacting with a virtual teaching assistant: from the student model to the intelligent tutor
    Pedro Mota
    Luísa Coheur (advisor), Maxine Eskenazi (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2012-09-01 - 2019-07-01
  • As colocações em corpora de PL2: identificação, classificação e análise de erros
    Angela Costa
    Teresa Lino (advisor), Luísa Coheur (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2011-10-01 - 2017-12-01
  • Combining multiple parallel streams for improved speech processing
    João Miranda
    João Paulo da Silva Neto (advisor), Luísa Coheur (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2011-09-01 - 2016-02-01
  • Machine Translation 4 Microblogs
    Wang Ling
    Isabel Trancoso (advisor), Luísa Coheur (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2010-09-01 - 2015-10-01
  • When the Answer comes into Question in Question-Answering
    Ana Cristina Mendes
    Luísa Coheur (advisor), Gábor Magyar (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2008-09-01 - 2013-11-01
  • Posterior Regularization Framework: Learning Tractable Models with Intractable Constraints
    João Graça
    Luísa Coheur (advisor), Ben Taskar (coadvisor)
    Doctoral Thesis (before Bologna), Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2006-09-01 - 2010-07-01

Master's Theses

Graduation Theses

  • Generating Realistic Sign Language Animations.
    Inês Lacerda
    Luísa Coheur (advisor),
    Graduation Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2019-09-01 - 2021-11-01

Internships

 

Total Projects: 22

International Projects

  • LAW TRAIN - Mixed-reality environment for training cross-national teams in joint investigative interrogation-Intelligent interrogation training simulator
    INESC-ID Lisboa, Horizon 2020, , 2015-05-01 - 2018-04-29
  • RAGE - Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem
    Open Universitaet Nederland, European Commission, , 2015-02-01 - 2019-01-31
  • SpeDial - Spoken Dialogue Analytics
    Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies, EC FP7-ICT-2013-SME-DCA, , 2013-12-01 - 2015-11-30
  • LIREC - LIving with Robots and InteractivE Companions
    Queen Mary, University of London, European Commission - 7th Framework Programme, Life and Health Technology, INESC-ID Lisboa2008-03-01 - 2012-08-31

National Projects

  • ACCELERAT.AI - ACCELERAT.AI
    DEFINED AI, IAPMEI, Societal Digital Transformation, FFCUL, NOS Comunicações, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Devscope - Soluções De Sistemas E Tecnologias De Formação, S.A., INESC-ID Lisboa, FCiências.ID - Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento de Ciências2023-01-01 - 2025-12-21
  • CRAI - Center for Responsible AI
    Unbabel, IAPMEI, Societal Digital Transformation, 2023-01-01 - 2025-12-31
  • IAG - Intelligent Agents Generator
    Xpand IT, IAPMEI, Societal Digital Transformation, INESC-ID Lisboa, Xpand IT, INOV2021-01-01 - 2022-12-31
  • MAIA - Multilingual AI Agent Assistants
    Unbabel, ANI e FCT, Societal Digital Transformation, 2020-04-01 - 2023-04-01
  • AVATAR - A Linguistic Corpus and an AVATAR for Portuguese Sign Language
    Universidade Católica Portuguesa, FCT, Societal Digital Transformation, 2018-10-01 - 2021-09-30
  • eSPERTo - Sistema de Parafraseamento para Edição e Revisão de Texto
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT, , 2014-10-01 - 2015-09-30
  • INSIDE - Sistemas Inteligentes de Robôs em Rede para Interacção Simbiótica com Crianças com Atrasos de Desenvolvimento
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT, , 2014-08-01 - 2018-12-31
  • AVoz - Models for automatic speech recognition for elderly
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT, , 2012-01-01 - 2013-12-31
  • FalaComigo - Enhance the Cultural Tourism through the Interaction with Virtual Characters
    NEWVISION, IAPMEI, , 2010-10-01 - 2013-03-10
  • PT-STAR - Speech Translation Advanced Research to and from Portuguese
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT Carnegie Mellon, , 2009-05-01 - 2012-07-31
  • NLE-GRID - Natural Language Engineering on a Computational GRID
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT, Life and Health Technology, 2005-06-01 - 2007-01-31
  • ATA - Automatic Term Acquisition
    INESC-ID Lisboa, FCT, Life and Health Technology, 2001-01-01 - 2003-03-31

Contracts

  • AIA - Intelligent Agent for the Attendance at the Entrepreneur´s Desk
    INESC-ID Lisboa, Universidade de Coimbra, , 2018-09-01 - 2020-02-28
  • LUP - Language Understanding Platform
    INESC-ID Lisboa, INOV, , 2012-10-01 - 2013-10-30
  • Tecnovoz - Tecnologias de Reconhecimento e Síntese de Voz
    CPC HS, PRIME, Medida 3.1A, Societal Digital Transformation, 2006-07-01 - 2008-06-07
  • Porto Editora 2 - Porto Editora 2
    INESC-ID Lisboa, Porto Editora, , 2006-03-17 - 2007-12-31
  • Porto Editora - Porto Editora
    INESC-ID Lisboa, Porto Editora, Societal Digital Transformation, 2004-06-01 - 2004-11-06

Conferences