person

Marie-Francine Moens

Full Professor , Director LIIR

Interests:
  • Natural Language Processing and Understanding
  • Multimedia Search
  • Machine Learning

Email:
sien.moens (at) kuleuven.be

Website

ORCiD Page

LinkedIn

KU Leuven Who-is-Who

Biography

Marie-Francine (Sien) Moens is full professor at the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. She holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from this university. She is the director of the Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval (LIIR) research lab, a member of the Human Computer Interaction group, and head of the Informatics section.

Her main direction of research is the development of novel methods for automated content recognition in text and multimedia using statistical machine learning and exploiting insights from linguistic and cognitive theories. She investigates topics such as:

  • Machine learning for natural language understanding, especially learning with limited supervision.
  • Machine learning for information retrieval, classification and aggregation.
  • Deep learning and latent variable models.
  • Information extraction, machine reading, semantic parsing, text mining, knowledge acquisition in the biomedical and legal domains.
  • Web search and mining.
  • Multimodal and multilingual processing, alignment and summarization of content.
  • Information retrieval and search models, question answering and reasoning.
  • Processing of noisy text such as user generated content and speech transcripts.
  • e-Forensics: content and email filtering.

She is holder of the ERC Advanced Grant CALCULUS (2018-2023) granted by the European Research Council. From 2012 till 2016 she was the coordinator of the MUSE project financed by Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) - Open of the European Commission. She is currently associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval from 2014 till 2018. In 2011 and 2012 she was appointed as chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) and was a member of the executive board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). From 2010 until 2014 she was a member of the Research Council of KU Leuven and from 2014 until 2018 she was a member of the Council of the Industrial Research Fund of KU Leuven. From 2014 till 2018 she was the scientific manager of the EU COST action iV&L Net (The European Network on Integrating Vision and Language).

Publications