André Martins, researcher from Instituto de Telecomunicações and PhD student from the joint IST–CMU PhD program under the supervision of Mário Figueiredo from IT, has been awarded the 2011 IBM Scientific Award with the work “Turbo Parsers: Dependency Parsing by Approximate Variational Inference”. Established in 1990, the IBM Scientific Prize is the most important Portuguese award for high scientific merit in computer science and is meant for researchers younger than 36 years.

The winning work proposes new methods, models, and algorithms for the syntactic analysis of natural language text. In technical terms, the goal is, given a sentence, to obtain its most likely dependency parse tree. The proposed parsers obtain state-of-the-art performance for 14 languages.