Chrysoula Zerva (4012-67B2-0616)

Curriculum Vitae

Chrysoula Zerva

Chrysoula Zerva is a post-doctoral researcher at the DeepSPIN Lab at Instituto Telecomunicacoes (IST). She previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester (NaCTeM group) and held the EPSRC doctoral prize fellowship (grant ref: EP/N509565/1), for the project: “Fake Health News: Leveraging scientific literature to validate misleading information”. She obtained her PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester (PhD thesis: “Automatic Identification of Textual Uncertainty”). She holds a MSc degree in Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a bachelor's degree from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her research interests lie in the quantification of uncertainty with a focus on NLP applications and the evaluation of credibility and trustworthiness of information. She is also interested in model explainability within the context of evidence and explanation generation as well as the disentanglement of textual aspects as latent representations. During her PhD she contributed in various projects, including EMPATHY and Big Mechanism and worked on event extraction and quantification of uncertainty for extracted events. During the EPSRC DP fellowship she worked on the automated identification of cited evidence text spans across documents and won the best system award in the CL-SciSumm 2019 shared task.

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Identification

Personal identification

Full name: Chrysoula Zerva

Citation names

Zerva, Chrysoula

Author identifiers

Ciência ID: 4012-67B2-0616
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4031-9492

Email addresses

chrysoula.zerva@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (Professional)

Knowledge fields

Exact Sciences - Computer and Information Sciences - Information Science

Languages

Language	Speaking	Reading	Writing	Listening	Peer-review
Greek (Mother tongue)
English	Proficiency (C2)	Proficiency (C2)	Proficiency (C2)	Proficiency (C2)	Proficiency (C2)
French	Intermediate (B1)	Intermediate (B1)	Intermediate (B1)	Intermediate (B1)	Intermediate (B1)

Education

	Degree	Classification
2014/10 - 2019/02 Concluded	CDT in Computer Science (Doctor) Major in Text Mining The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom "Automatic Identification of Textual Uncertainty" (THESIS/DISSERTATION)
2012/09 - 2014/07/10 Concluded	Computer Science (Master) Major in Informatics École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland "Recycling Named Entity Taggers: Unsupervised Domain and Language Adaptation for NER based on Parallel Corpora" (THESIS/DISSERTATION)	5.41/6.00
2006/10 - 2012/07/16 Concluded	School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Bachelor) Major in Information Tecnology Ethniko Metsobio Polytechneio, Greece "Noun Entity Extraction & Text Enrichment using the Semantic Web" (THESIS/DISSERTATION)

Affiliation

Science

	Category Host institution	Employer
2021/02/16 - Current	Postdoc (Research)	Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
	Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2019/11/15 - 2020/12/31	Postdoc (Research)	The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom
	The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom
2017/09 - 2019/12	Visiting Researcher (Research)	National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIRC, Japan
	National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIRC, Japan
2018/11/06 - 2019/11/01	Visiting Researcher (Research)	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, United Kingdom
	The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom

Teaching in Higher Education

	Category Host institution	Employer
2023/08/01 - Current	Assistant Professor (University Teacher)	Instituto Superior Técnico Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Portugal

Projects

Grant

	Designation	Funders
2025/02/01 - 2026/01/31	OptiGov: Aproveitar a IA para a Eficiência dos Processos na Administração Pública 2024.07385.IACDC Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Portugal	Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia Ongoing
2021/10/01 - 2025/12/31	Center for Responsible AI 02/C05-i01.02/2022.PC645008882-00000055 Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal	Next Generation EU - Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR) Ongoing
2022/10/01 - 2025/09/30	Unified Transcription and Translation for Extended Reality (UTTER) 101070631 Research Fellow Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal	Horizon 2020 Ongoing
2018/11 - 2019/11	Fake Health News: Leveraging scientific literature to rank credibility of health articles EP/N509565/1 Principal investigator The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Concluded
2014/09 - 2018/09	Towards unsupervised adaptation of information extraction from texts: Focusing on event extraction 1515927 - EP/1038099/1 (CDT) PhD Student Fellow The University of Manchester School of Computer Science, United Kingdom	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Concluded

Outputs

Publications

Conference paper

Joel Mire; Zubin Trivadi Aysola; Daniel Chechelnitsky; Nicholas Deas; Zerva, Chrysoula; Maarten Sap. "Rejected Dialects: Biases Against African American Language in Reward Models". Paper presented in North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025), Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2025.
Accepted
Zerva, Chrysoula; Martins, Bruno; Gonçalo Gomes. "Evaluation of Multilingual Image Captioning: How far can we get with CLIP models?". Paper presented in NAACL: Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Albuquerque, 2025.
Zerva, Chrysoula; Blain, Frederic; C. De Souza, José G.; Kanojia, Diptesh; Deoghare, Sourabh; Guerreiro, Nuno M.; Attanasio, Giuseppe; et al. "Findings of the Quality Estimation Shared Task at WMT 2024: Are LLMs Closing the Gap in QE?". Paper presented in Conference on Machine Translation, Miami, 2024.
Accepted • 10.18653/v1/2024.wmt-1.3
Thomas, Konstantinos; Filandrianos, Giorgos; Lymperaiou, Maria; Zerva, Chrysoula; Stamou, Giorgos. "”I Never Said That”: A dataset, taxonomy and baselines on response clarity classification". Paper presented in EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Miami, 2024.
Accepted • 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.300
Freitag, Markus; Mathur, Nitika; Deutsch, Daniel; Lo, Chi-Kiu; Avramidis, Eleftherios; Rei, Ricardo; Thompson, Brian; et al. "Are LLMs Breaking MT Metrics? Results of the WMT24 Metrics Shared Task". Paper presented in EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Miami, 2024.
Accepted • 10.18653/v1/2024.wmt-1.2
Glushkova, T.; Zerva, C.; Martins, A.F.T.. "BLEU Meets COMET: Combining Lexical and Neural Metrics Towards Robust Machine Translation Evaluation". 2023.
Blain, F.; Zerva, C.; Rei, R.; Guerreiro, N.M.; Kanojia, D.; de Souza, J.G.C.; Silva, B.; et al. "Findings of the WMT 2023 Shared Task on Quality Estimation". 2023.
Honda, S.; Fernandes, P.; Zerva, C.. "Context-aware Neural Machine Translation for English-Japanese Business Scene Dialogues". 2023.
Filandrianos, G.; Dervakos, E.; Menis-Mastromichalakis, O.; Zerva, C.; Stamou, G.. "Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors". 2023.
Fomicheva, M.; Sun, S.; Fonseca, E.; Zerva, C.; Blain, F.; Chaudhary, V.; Guzmán, F.; et al. "MLQE-PE: A Multilingual Quality Estimation and Post-Editing Dataset". 2022.
Martins, A.F.T.; Peters, B.; Zerva, C.; Lyu, C.; Correia, G.; Treviso, M.; Martins, P.; Mihaylova, T.. "DeepSPIN: Deep Structured Prediction for Natural Language Processing". 2022.
Zerva, C.; Glushkova, T.; Rei, R.; Martins, A.F.T.. "Disentangling Uncertainty in Machine Translation Evaluation". 2022.
Vasilakes, J.; Zerva, C.; Miwa, M.; Ananiadou, S.. "Learning Disentangled Representations of Negation and Uncertainty". 2022.
Rei, R.; Treviso, M.; Guerreiro, N.M.; Zerva, C.; Farinha, A.C.; Maroti, C.; de Souza, J.G.C.; et al. "COMETKIWI: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task". 2022.
Glushkova, Taisiya; Zerva, Chrysoula; Rei, Ricardo; Martins, André F. T.. "Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation". Punta Cana, 2021.
Accepted • 10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.330
Dervakos, E.; Filandrianos, G.; Thomas, K.; Mandalios, A.; Zerva, C.; Stamou, G.. "Semantic enrichment of pretrained embedding output for unsupervised IR". Paper presented in AAAI-MAKE, 2021.
Accepted
Specia, L.; Blain, F.; Fomicheva, M.; Zerva, C.; Li, Z.; Chaudhary, V.; Martins, A.F.T.. "Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation". 2021.
Glushkova, T.; Zerva, C.; Rei, R.; Martins, A.F.T.. "Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation". 2021.
Zerva, C.; Nghiem, M.-Q.; Nguyen, N.T.H.; Ananiadou, S.. "NaCTeM-UoM @ CL-SciSumm 2019". 2019.
Zerva, Chrysoula; Ananiadou, Sophia. "Paths for uncertainty: Exploring the intricacies of uncertainty identification for news". 2018.
Accepted • 10.18653/v1/w18-1302
Batista-Navarro, R.; Zerva, C.; Ananiadou, S.. "Construction of a biodiversity knowledge repository using a text mining-based framework". 2016.
Zerva, Chrysoula; Ananiadou, Sophia. "Event Extraction in pieces:Tackling the partial event identification problem on unseen corpora". 2015.
10.18653/v1/w15-3804
Zerva, C.; Ananiadou, S.. "Event Extraction in pieces: Tackling the partial event identification problem on unseen corpora". 2015.

Journal article

Zerva, Chrysoula; Martins, André F. T.. "Conformalizing Machine Translation Evaluation". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 12 (2024): 1460-1478. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00711.
Published • 10.1162/tacl_a_00711
Campos, Margarida; Farinhas, António; Zerva, Chrysoula; Figueiredo, Mário A. T.; Martins, André F. T.. "Conformal Prediction for Natural Language Processing: A Survey". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 12 (2024): 1497-1516. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00715.
Published • 10.1162/tacl_a_00715
Zerva, C.; Taylor, S.; Soto, A.J.; Nguyen, N.T.H.; Ananiadou, S.. "A term-based and citation network-based search system for COVID-19". JAMIA Open 4 4 (2021): http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85142184560&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab104
Chrysoula Zerva; Minh-Quoc Nghiem; Nhung T. H. Nguyen; Sophia Ananiadou. "Cited text span identification for scientific summarisation using pre-trained encoders". Scientometrics 125 3 (2020): 3109-3137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03455-z.
10.1007/s11192-020-03455-z
Chrysoula Zerva; Riza Batista-Navarro; Philip Day; Sophia Ananiadou; Jonathan Wren. "Using uncertainty to link and rank evidence from biomedical literature for model curation". Bioinformatics 33 23 (2017): 3784-3792. https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fbioinformatics%2Fbtx466.
10.1093/bioinformatics/btx466
Axel J Soto; Chrysoula Zerva; Riza Batista-Navarro; Sophia Ananiadou; Jonathan Wren. "LitPathExplorer: a confidence-based visual text analytics tool for exploring literature-enriched pathway models". Bioinformatics 34 8 (2017): 1389-1397. https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fbioinformatics%2Fbtx774.
10.1093/bioinformatics/btx774

Other

Other output

Non-Exchangeable Conformal Language Generation with Nearest Neighbors. 2024. Ulmer, D.; Zerva, C.; Martins, A.F.T.. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85185376991&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
10.48550/arXiv.2402.00707
Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation: From Theory to Applications. 2023. Baan, J.; Daheim, N.; Ilia, E.; Ulmer, D.; Li, H.-S.; Fernández, R.; Plank, B.; et al. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85167958766&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
NON-EXCHANGEABLE CONFORMAL RISK CONTROL. 2023. Farinhas, A.; Zerva, C.; Ulmer, D.; Martins, A.F.T.. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85174876471&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
10.48550/arXiv.2310.01262
Conformalizing Machine Translation Evaluation. 2023. Zerva, C.; Martins, A.F.T.. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85165916366&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
Uncertainty-aware machine translation evaluation. 2021. Glushkova, T.; Zerva, C.; Rei, R.; Martins, A.F.T.. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85115872863&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
MLQE-PE: A multilingual quality estimation and post-editing dataset. 2020. Fomicheva, M.; Sun, S.; Fonseca, E.; Zerva, C.; Blain, F.; Chaudhary, V.; Guzmán, F.; et al. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85117378318&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
MLQE-PE: A multilingual quality estimation and post-editing dataset. 2020. Fomicheva, M.; Sun, S.; Fonseca, E.; Zerva, C.; Blain, F.; Chaudhary, V.; Guzmán, F.; et al. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85170925479&partnerID=MN8TOARS.
10.48550/arxiv.2010.04480
A Text Mining-Based Framework for Constructing an RDF-Compliant Biodiversity Knowledge Repository. 2017. Riza Batista-Navarro; Chrysoula Zerva; Nhung T. H. Nguyen; Sophia Ananiadou. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-319-55209-5_3.
10.1007/978-3-319-55209-5_3

Activities

Supervision

	Thesis Title Role	Degree Subject (Type) Institution / Organization
2024/01/01 - Current	Evaluation Metrics for Vision-Language Models Co-supervisor	Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Portugal
2024/09/01 - 2029/08/01	Bias and uncertainty in multilingual language generation Supervisor	PhD in Computer Science (PhD) Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute, United States Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024/12 - 2025/10	Predicting prices in the MIBEL using Artificial Inteligence Co-supervisor	Engenharia e Ciência de Dados (Master) EDP, Portugal Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	“What do you mean?” Teaching large language models to ask for clarifications Supervisor	Computer Science and Engineering (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	Augmenting LLMs with formal languages to improve performance in downstream NLP tasks Co-supervisor	Engenharia Informática e de Computadores (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	CounterFORCE - CounterFactuals Optimization for Robustness and fairness through Consistency Evaluation Supervisor	Engenharia Informática e de Computadores (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Associação Fraunhofer Portugal Research, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	Mechanistic interpretability of story generation in large language models Co-supervisor	Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Fundação Champalimaud, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	Non-exchangeable conformal prediction for hallucination mitigation Co-supervisor	Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024/09 - 2025/10	Process-aware language models: learning to disambiguate queries with respect to business process knowledge Co-supervisor	Engenharia Informática e de Computadores (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2020/08/01 - 2024/04/30	Uncertainty Estimation and Robustness in Machine Translation Evaluation Co-supervisor of Taisiya Glushkova	Computer Science - NLP (PhD) (PhD) Instituto Superior Técnico Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Portugal
2022/10 - 2023/10	Exploring Context Representation for Machine Translation with Large Language Models Supervisor	Computational Linguistics (Master) Universität Potsdam, Germany

Event organisation

	Event name Type of event (Role)	Institution / Organization
2022 - Current	Quality Estimation Shared Task @WMT 2022 conference: co-organiser (2022) Workshop (Co-organisor)
2025/11 - 2025/11	2nd UncertaiNLP workshop @EMNLP 2025, China. Human languages are inherently ambiguous and understanding language input is subject to interpretation and complex contextual dependencies. Nevertheless, the main body of research in NLP is still based on the assumption that ambiguities and other types of underspecification can and have to be resolved. This workshop will provide a platform for research that embraces variability in human language and aims to represent and evaluate the uncertainty that arises from it, and from modeling tools themselves. (2025/11) Workshop (Co-organisor)
2024 - 2024	Quality Estimation Shared Task @WMT 2024 conference: co-organiser (2024 - 2024) Workshop
2024 - 2024	Metrics Shared Task @WMT 2024 conference: co-organiser (2024 - 2024) Workshop (Co-organisor)
2023 - 2023	Quality Estimation Shared Task @WMT 2023 conference: co-organiser (2023 - 2023) Workshop (Co-organisor)
2023 - 2023	Metrics Shared Task @WMT 2023 conference: co-organiser (2023 - 2023) Workshop (Co-organisor)
2021 - 2021	Quality Estimation Shared Task @WMT 2021 conference: co-organiser (2021 - 2021) Conference (Co-organisor)

Jury of academic degree

	Topic Role	Candidate name (Type of degree) Institution / Organization
2024	MSC thesis evaluation committee for the thesis of Daniel Alexandre Quintas Lopes, "Encoding and Retrieving Memories for Persona Grounded Dialogues", MEIC (2024) (Thesis) Main arguer	Daniel Alexandre Quintas Lopes (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2024	Evaluator for the MSc thesis of Leonor Maria Machado Barreiros, "Clinical Entity Linking", MEIC (2024) (Thesis) Main arguer	Leonor Maria Machado Barreiros (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2023/11	MSc thesis jyry for the topic "Automatic Identification of Regions of Interest in Dermoscopy Images Using Vision Transformers and Multiple Instance Learning" (Thesis) Main arguer	Diogo Araújo (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2023/10	MSc thesis jury for the topic "SmartTags: Continuously learning to suggest news articles according to user preferences" (Thesis) Main arguer	Tomás Afonso Alves Louro Mendes (Master) Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Engenharia, Portugal
2023	MSc thesis jury for the topic "Accurate and Well-Calibrated ICD Code Assignment with a Chunk-Based Classifier Attending over Diverse Label Embeddings" (Thesis) Main arguer	Gonçalo Emanuel Cavaco Gomes (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
2022/11	MSc thesis jury for the topic: "Aleatoric Uncertainty with Test-Time Augmentation for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving" (Thesis) Main arguer	Rui Magalhães (Master) Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal

Conference scientific committee

	Conference name	Conference host
2021 - 2021	EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Course / Discipline taught

	Academic session	Degree Subject (Type)	Institution / Organization
2021/09 - 2021/11	Machine Learning course	Machine Learning - Aprendizagem Automática (Mestrado)	Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal