Raúl Vázquez

Postdoctoral researcher at University of Helsinki in the Language Technology group
Email: raul.vazquez@helsinki.fi

ABOUT ME

I am a posdoctoral researcher and teaching staff at the University of Helsink. I specialize in advancing natural language understanding and processing (NLU & NLP) through data-driven methodologies. My current research focuses in uncertainty modelling in neural language models, like Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural machine translation (NMT) systems.

I obtained my PhD in Computational Linguistics in 2023 under the supervision of Jörg Tiedemann and Mathias Creutz, where my research centered on representation learning using massively multilingual parallel corpora, and the development of models for multilingual and multimodal machine translation. Prior to my PhD, I earned an MSc in Mathematical Modelling from Università degli Studi dell'Aquila in 2017 and a BSc in Applied Mathematics from ITAM (Mexico's Autonomous Institute of Technology) in 2015. My research interests encompass Advanced Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Applied Mathematics.

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EDUCATION




PhD. in Language Technology

University of Helsinki

2018-2022

Supervisor: Jörg Tiedemann
co-Supervisor: Mathias Creutz
Projects: FoTran and MeMAD

Focus Areas: Natural Language Processing, Neural Machine Translation, Mathematical Modelling

M. Sc. Mathematical Engineering

Universitá degli Studi dell'Aquila

2015-2017

Scholarship award from the EU Commission.

Thesis: The Vehicle Routing Problem - An Application and Proposed Heuristics
Adviser: Claudio Arbib
co-Adviser: Stefano Smriglio

Focus Area: ODEs, PDEs, Optimization

M. Sc. Technomathematik

Hamburg Universität

2016-2017

Joint degree awarded for completing the MathMods Joint M.Sc.

Focus Areas: non-smooth Convex Optimization and Numerical Approximation methods for PDEs


B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics

Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)

2008-2015

Thesis: A Bayesian Approach to Time Series Smoothing via the Hodrick-Prescott Filter Modelling
Adviser: Enrique de Alba Guerra

Focus Areas: Statistics, Probability, Linear and non-Linear Optimization

EXPERIENCE




Researcher

University of Helsinki

2018-2023

Development of models for natural language understanding (NLU) with a data-driven approach that incorporates massively multilingual parallel corpora and the use of diverse input signals.



Project Coordinator and Research Assistant

INEGI - Mexico's Official Statistics Bureau

2014-2015

I assisted the Institute’s vice-president of Economical Information, Enrique de Alba Guerra. Duties involved statistical analysis of time series and results visualization, as well as application and implementation of research articles.

Data Science Lab Collaborator

Sedesol - Secretatiat of Social Development

2017-2018

Directly involved in the development of a monitor of agricultural production via remote-sensing data as part of a hunger early-warning system for the Mexican government.




Logistics Coordinator Volunteer

TECHO | Mexico

2012

I collaborated with the planning and implementation of a project for the detection of irregular settlements, and the establishment of a first contact between said settlements and the NGO.

Research Collaboration

LFondry and Universitá degli Studi dell'Aquila

2017

Development of an optimization model for improving LFoundry’s production line. Customization of the Vehicle Routing Problem through Gurobi and GLPK software to improve microchips pickup and delivery time.


Vehicle Inspection Intern

Volkswagen Hannover

2012

Created a graphical interface to improve the production line operation. I also prepared automated infrared signal sender and receiver for facilitating the interface usage and information extraction.

PUBLICATIONS

​ 2024
Raúl Vázquez, Hande Celikkanat, Dennis Ulmer, Jörg Tiedemann, Swabha Swayamdipta, Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank, Joris Baan and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (2024). Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2024) Proceedings of UncertaiNLP2024

Raúl Vázquez, Timothee Mickus, Jörg Tiedemann, Ivan Vulić and Ahmen Üstün (2024). Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024) Proceedings of MOOMIN2024

Timothee Mickus, Stig-Arne Grönroos, Joseph Attieh, Michele Boggia, Ona De Gibert, Shaoxiong Ji, Niki Andreas Loppi, Alessandro Raganato, Raúl Vázquez, and Jörg Tiedemann (2024). MAMMOTH: Massively Multilingual Modular Open Translation @ Helsinki Proceedings of EACL2024



2023
Ona de Gibert, Raúl Vázquez, Mikko Aulamo, Sami Virpioja and Jörg Tiedemann (2023). Four Approaches to Low-Resource Multilingual NMT: The Helsinki Submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task Proceedings of AmericasNLP2023

Timothee Mickus and Raúl Vázquez (2023). Why Bother with Geometry? On the Relevance of Linear Decompositions of Transformer Embeddings Proceedings of BlackboxNLP2023

Michele Boggia, Stig-Arne Grönroos, Niki Loppi, Timothee Mickus, Alessandro Raganato, Jörg Tiedemann and Raúl Vázquez, (2023). Dozens of Translation Directions or Millions of Shared Parameters? Comparing Two Types of Multilinguality in Modular Machine Translation Proceedings of NoDaLiDa2023



2022
Raúl Vázquez, Michele Boggia, Alessandro Raganato, Niki A. Loppi, Stig-Arne Grönroos and Jörg Tiedemann (2022). Latest Development in the FoTran Project – Scaling Up Language Coverage in Neural Machine Translation Using Distributed Training with Language-Specific Components. Proceedings of EAMT2022.

Raúl Vázquez, Hande Celikkanat, Vinit Ravishankar, Mathias Creutz and Jörg Tiedemann (2022). A Closer Look at Parameter Contributions When Training Neural Language and Translation Models. Proceedings of COLING2022



2021
Alessandro Raganato, Raúl Vázquez, Mathias Creutz and Jörg Tiedemann. (2021). An Empirical Investigation of Word Alignment Supervision for Zero-shot Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. Proceedings of EMNLP2021.

Raúl Vázquez, Hande Celikkanat, Mathias Creutz and Jörg Tiedemann (2021). On the differences between BERT and MT encoder spaces and how to address them in translation tasks. ACL-SRW2021.

Raúl Vázquez, Yves Scherer, Sami Virpioja and Jörg Tiedemann (2021). The Helsinki Submission to the AmericasNLP shared task. Proceedings of NAACL2021 (AmericasNLP)



2020
Raúl Vázquez, Alessandro Raganato, Mathias Creutz, and Jörg Tiedemann (2020). A Systematic Study of Inner-Attention-Based Sentence Representations in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. Computational Linguistics. Volume 46, Issue 2.

Raúl Vázquez, Mikko Aulamo, Umut Sulubacak, & Jörg Tiedemann (2020). The University of Helsinki Submission to the IWSLT2020 Offline Speech Translation Task. Proceedings of IWSLT2020



2019
Raúl Vázquez, Alessandro Raganato, Jörg Tiedemann and Mathias Creutz. 2019. Multilingual NMT with a language-independent attention bridge. Proceedings of RepL4NLP2019.

Alessandro Raganato, Raúl Vázquez, Mathias Creutz and Jörg Tiedemann. 2019. An Evaluation of Language-Agnostic Inner-Attention-Based Representations in Machine Translation. Proceedings of RepL4NLP2019.

Raúl Vázquez, Umut Sulubacak and Jörg Tiedemann. 2019. The University of Helsinki Submission to the WMT2019 Parallel Corpus Filtering Task. Proceedings of WMT2019.

Yves Scherrer, Raúl Vázquez, and Sami Virpioja. 2019. The University of Helsinki Submissions to the WMT2019 Similar Languages Translation Task. Proceedings of WMT2019.

Aarne Talman, Umut Sulubacak, Raúl Vázquez, Yves Scherrer, Sami Virpioja, Alessandro Raganato, Arvi Hurskainen, and Jörg Tiedemann. 2019. The University of Helsinki Submission to the WMT2019 News Translation Task. Proceedings of WMT2019.



2018
Raúl Vázquez, Alessandro Raganato, Jörg Tiedemann and Mathias Creutz. 2018. Multilingual NMT with a language-independent attention bridge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00498.

Stig-Arne Grönroos, Benoit Huet, Mikko Kurimo, Jorma Laaksonen, Bernard Merialdo, Phu Pham, Mats Sjöberg, Umut Sulubacak, Jörg Tiedemann, Raphael Troncy and Raúl Vázquez. 2018. The MeMAD Submission to the WMT18 Multimodal Translation Task. Proceedings of WMT2018. Belgium Brussels


CONTACT

Email
University email: raul.vazquez@helsinki.fi

Address
Unioninkatu 40 A, Saali A 316
00014 - Helsinki, Finland.

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