Rate My Professor Fernando Alva Manchego

Dr Fernando Alva Manchego is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, where he joined in January 2022. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield, with a thesis titled "Automatic Sentence Simplification with Multiple Rewriting Transformations," supervised by Prof. Lucia Specia and Dr. Carolina Scarton. Prior to his current role, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield's Natural Language Processing Group from 2020 to 2021, contributing to projects including APE-QUEST and Bergamot on quality estimation for machine translation. Earlier, he was an Adjunct Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru from 2013 to 2016, affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Group IA-PUCP, and participated in the Interinstitutional Center for Computational Linguistics at the University of São Paulo during his master's studies.

His research centers on text-to-text generation, including text simplification, summarisation and machine translation, as well as the evaluation of natural language generation systems, writing assistance tools and natural language processing applications for education. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications, such as "Data-Driven Sentence Simplification: Survey and benchmark" in Computational Linguistics (2020), "The (un)suitability of automatic evaluation metrics for text simplification" in Computational Linguistics (2021) and "Controllable text simplification with explicit paraphrasing" presented at NAACL (2021). Dr Alva Manchego has presented work at major conferences including ACL, EMNLP, LREC and NAACL, advancing benchmarks and datasets for sentence simplification and related tasks. His contributions extend to projects on multilingual question generation, readability assessment and language resources for Welsh and other languages.