Appointments

• Research Scientist. 2016 – present.
• Scientist. 2012 – 2016. Qatar Computing Research Institute.
• Postdoctoral Researcher. 2012 – 2012. Qatar Computing Research Institute.
• Visiting Scholar. 2008 – 2009. Carnegie Mellon University.

Publications

Books and Book Chapters

• Francisco Guzmán, Qin Gao, Jan Niehues, and Stephan Vogel. Word Alignment Revisited. In Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation: DARPA global autonomous language exploitation . Joseph Olive, Caitlin Christianson, and John McCary (Eds). Springer Science & Business Media. 2011.

Conferences and Transactions

• Francisco Guzmán, Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. Machine translation evaluation with neural networks . In Computer Speech & Language, 2016.
• Francisco Guzmán, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Baly, and Nizar Habash. Machine Translation Evaluation for Arabic using Morphologically-enriched Embeddings . In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics . 2016.
• Preslav Nakov, Lluís Màrquez, and Francisco Guzmán. It Takes Three to Tango: Triangulation Approach to Answer Ranking in Community Question Answering . In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing . 2016.
• Francisco Guzmán, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. Machine Translation Evaluation Meets Community Question Answering . In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics . 2016.
• Hassan Sajjad, Francisco Guzmán, Nadir Durrani, Ahmed Abdelali, Houda Bouamor, Irina Temnikova, and Stephan Vogel. Eyes Don't Lie: Predicting Machine Translation Quality Using Eye Movement . In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies . 2016.
• Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, Stephan Vogel. Analyzing Optimization for Statistical Machine Translation: MERT Learns Verbosity, PRO Learns Length . In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL). 2015.
• Francisco Guzmán, Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. Pairwise Neural Machine Translation Evaluation . In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and The 7th International Joint Conference of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing . 2015.
• Francisco Guzmán, Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, Alessandro Moschitti, Preslav Nakov, and Massimo Nicosia. Learning to Differentiate Better from Worse Translations . In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2014.
• Francisco Guzmán, Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. Using Discourse Structure Improves Machine Translation Evaluation . In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'14). 2014.
• Dean Jansen, Aleli Alcala, and Francisco Guzmán. Amara: A Sustainable, Global Solution for Accessibility, Powered by Communities of Volunteers . In Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design for All and Accessibility Practice. 2014.
• Ahmed Abdelali, Francisco Guzmán, Hassan Sajjad, and Stephan Vogel. The AMARA Corpus: Building parallel language resources for the educational domain . In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14). 2014.
• Preslav Nakov, Fahad Al Obaidli, Francisco Guzmán, and Stephan Vogel. Parameter Optimization for Statistical Machine Translation: It Pays to Learn from Hard Examples . In Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'13). 2013.
• Preslav Nakov, Francisco Guzmán, and Stephan Vogel. A Tale about PRO and Monsters . In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'13). 2013.
• Francisco Guzmán, and Stephan Vogel. Understanding the Performance of Statistical MT Systems: A Linear Regression Framework . In Proceedings of the 24rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012). 2012.
• Preslav Nakov, Francisco Guzmán, and Stephan Vogel. Optimizing for Sentence-Level BLEU+1 Yields Short Translations. In Proceedings of the 24rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012). 2012.
• Qin Gao, Francisco Guzmán, and Stephan Vogel. EMDC: a semi-supervised approach for word alignment . In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010). 2010.
• Francisco Guzmán, Qin Gao and Stephan Vogel. Reassessment of the role of phrase extraction in pbsmt. In Machine Translation Summit XII. 2009.
• Francisco Guzmán, and Leonardo Garrido. Translation paraphrases in phrase-based machine translation. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing'08). 2008.
• Francisco Guzmán, and Leonardo Garrido. Using Translation Paraphrases from Trilingual Corpora to Improve Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation: A Preliminary Report . In Sixth Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI-07). 2007.
• Francisco Guzmán, and Leonardo Garrido. Towards Traffic Light Control Through a Cooperative Multiagent System: A Simulation-Based Study . In Proceedings of the 2005 Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium (ADS05) at the 2005 Spring Simulation Multiconference (SpringSim'05). 2005.

Workshops and Demonstrations

• Wajdi Zaghouani, Ahmed Abdelali, Francisco Guzmán, and Hassan Sajjad. Normalizing Mathematical Expressions to Improve the Translation of Educational Content . In Proceedings of the Workshop on Semitic Machine Translation . 2016.
• Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, and Lluís Màrquez. MTE-NN at SemEval-2016 Task 3: Can Machine Translation Evaluation Help Community Question Answering? . In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016) . 2016.
• Ahmed Abdelali, Nadir Durrani, and Francisco Guzmán. iAppraise: A Manual Machine Translation Evaluation Environment Supporting Eye-tracking . In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations . 2016.
• Francisco Guzmán, Ahmed Abdelali, Irina Temnikova, Hassan Sajjad, and Stephan Vogel. How do Humans Evaluate Machine Translation . In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation. 2015.
• Ahmed Abdelali, Ahmed Ali, Francisco Guzmán, Felix Stahlberg, Stephan Vogel, Yifan Zhang. QAT² – The QCRI Advanced Transcription and Translation System . In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH. 2015.
• Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani, Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Abdelali, Stephan Vogel, Wael Salloum, Ahmed El Kholy, Nizar Habash. The QCN Egyptian Arabic to English Statistical Machine Translation System for NIST OpenMT’2015 . In Proceedings of the NIST Open Machine Translation Evaluation Workshop. 2015.
• Shafiq Joty, Francisco Guzmán, Lluís Màrquez, and Preslav Nakov. DiscoTK: Using Discourse Structure for Machine Translation Evaluation . In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT'14). 2014.
• Francisco Guzmán, Hassan Sajjad, Ahmed Abdelali, and Stephan Vogel. The AMARA Corpus: Building Resources for Translating the Web's Educational Content . In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT'13). 2013.
• Hassan Sajjad, Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Abdelali, Kenton Murray, Fahad Al Obaidli, and Stephan Vogel. QCRI at IWSLT 2013: Experiments in Arabic-English and English-Arabic Spoken Language Translation . In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT'13). 2013.
• Francisco Guzmán, Preslav Nakov, Ahmed Thabet, and Stephan Vogel. QCRI at WMT12: Experiments in Spanish-English and German-English Machine Translation of News Text . In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT'12). 2012.

Technical Reports

• Francisco Guzmán, and Leonardo Garrido. Multiagent-Based Traffic Simulation. In Technical Report CSI-RI-005. 2005.

Invited talks

• Machine Translation: A Game Changer for the Translation Professionals? . 2015. Introduction to SMT and post-editing for professional translators. With Stephan Vogel. Sixth Annual International Translation Conference (TII).
• Preparing your summer internship. Hot Summer/Cool Research program.. 2015. I gave a talk to my colleagues at QCRI about my recommendations on how to prepare for the summer internship program.
• A Brief introduction to MT Evaluation. 2015. I gave a talk "A Brief Introduction to MT Evaluation" at the First MT Marathon in the Americas .
• Método para la Traducción Automática Estadística. 2009. Introductory talk to SMT (Spanish). Tecnológico de Orizaba.

Mentoring

• Computer Assisted Learning for Arabic Speaking ESL Students.. 2016 (9 months). In this senior thesis project, we explored the challenges of using machine translated subtitles in a learning environment.
• Word Emotion Detector. 2015 (8 weeks). We explored the use of consumer-level eyetracking, face emotion detection, and electroencephalography technologies to detect the user reactions to written text.
• Interactive Translation of Educational Videos. 2014 (8 weeks). We analyzed different aspects of post-editing, and integrated translator-friendly features into the open-source Amara platform.
• Meeting Translation Demo. 2013 (8 weeks). We built a web-based, Arabic-English speech-translation application using WebRTC, an in-house Speech Recognition and Translation Engines.
• Madar Huruf. 2013 (3 months). Together with Qatar Foundation International (QFI) we built an instructional application for learning the Arabic alphabet.
• Arabia - Arabic Language Learning iOS App. 2012 (8 weeks). We built an interactive Arabic language learning application, which provided pronunciation and writing feedback. We used ASR and OCR.
• Arabic News Translation. 2012 (6 months). We built an application to translate AlJazeera webpages text and multimedia content. We used ASR to extract Arabic subtitles from videos, and then translated them into English.
• Clustered Optimization for SMT. 2012 (3 months). We explored the use of clustering techniques during MT optimization to produce better parameter estimation.
• Nahuatl Machine Translation System. 2008 (4 weeks). A short summer project where we collected parallel Spanish-Nahuatl data and build a web interface for a translation system using Moses decoder.

Awards

• QSTP Accelerator program. 2016. Our proposal "Faham LT" for customized translation for Arabic and English, got granted $100K USD in accelerator funding to run from February to May 2016..
• Best in show award. 2014. We won the "Best in show" award for our Speech-to-Speech Translation demo at the BBC NewsHack III Hackathon in London, UK.
• Best metric in competition. 2014. Our Machine Translation evaluation metric discoTK won the first place in the WMT2014 Metrics task.
• Best system for Arabic English. 2013. Our Arabic-English and English-Arabic systems won the first place at IWSLT2013 translation tasks according to official metrics.
• Best unconstrained system Spanish-English. 2012. Our Spanish-English system was the best performing unconstraind system according to human evaluation metrics at WMT 2012.
• Best poster award. 2007. For CiCLing paper Using Translation Paraphrases from Trilingual Corpora to Improve Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation: A Preliminary Report with Leonardo Garrido.

Professional Service

• Proposal Evaluator. Challenge 22, Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), 2015.
• Local Organizer. EMNLP 2014.
• Student Scholarship Chair. EMNLP 2015.
• Program Committee. WMT 2015/2014, IWLSLT 2015, DiscoMT 2015, AICCSA 2014, LT4CloseLang 2014.
• Reviewer. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Computer Speech and Language.
• Reviewer. NAACL 2016, SemEval 2015.
• Subreviewer. COLING, CiCling.

Grants

• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2014. With Kemal Oflazer. Conference & Workshop Sponsorship Program (CWSP), Qatar National Research Fund, USD 70K.

Student Committees

• Alaa Khader. Advisor, CMUQ, 2016. B.S. awarded 2016.
• Roberto Aceves. Dissertation committee, ITESM, 2011. M.S. awarded 2011.

Patents

• PCT/ EP2013/050521. Dynamically adapting Machine Translation. US 14/760,436 (pending). Describes a system in which models used for translation, as well as their optimized parameters are changed dynamically in function of the input text.

Engineering Positions

• Software Engineer. 2005-2006. Neoris, Mexico.