Dr Mariano Felice, Senior Researcher: Data Scientist for Language Assessment & Learning

Mariano leads the artificial intelligence (AI) strategy for language learning and assessment at the British Council. His role involves researching the application of natural language processing (NLP) to language assessment, providing strategic guidance for the development and adoption of AI solutions, and promoting AI literacy and responsible use of new technologies.  

 

With over a decade of experience, Mariano has worked on a wide range of topics, including grammatical error correction, automatic error typing, system evaluation, automated cloze test generation and item difficulty prediction. He has published numerous scientific papers in top-tier NLP conferences and is a regular speaker at international conferences as well as a reviewer for workshops, journals and conferences in his field. Mariano is also a visiting scholar at the University of Reading and the University of Cambridge.

 

Watch Mariano's contribution to the panel discussion "Humans and technology" at the 2022 British Council New Directions conference in Denpasar, Indonesia, below:

Areas of expertise

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Automated Language Teaching and Assessment

Publications

Dunlea, J., O’Sullivan, B., Patel, M., Westbrook, C., Cooke, S., Motteram, J., Lightfoot, A., Felice, M., Karaöz Duran, Z. & Spiby, R. (2024). Assessing English as an International Language. In The Routledge Handbook of Teaching English as an International Language, edited by Nicola Galloway and Ali Fuad Selvi.

Felice, M. & Duran Karaoz, Z. (2024). The British Council submission to the BEA 2024 shared task. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024), pp. 503-511, Mexico City, Mexico, June. Association for Computational Linguistics.
 
Taslimipoor, S., Benedetto, L., Felice, M. & Buttery, P. (2024). Distractor Generation Using Generative and Discriminative Capabilities of Transformer-based Models. In In Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pp. 5052--5063, Turin, Italy, May. European Language Resources Association.

Zampieri, M., North, K., Jauhiainen, T., Felice, M., Kumari, N., Nair, N. & Mahesh Bangera, Y. (2024). Language Variety Identification with True Labels. In Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pp. 10100--10109, Turin, Italy, May. European Language Resources Association. 

Felice, M., Taslimipoor, S., Andersen, Ø. E., & Buttery, P. (2022). CEPOC: The Cambridge Exams Publishing Open Cloze dataset. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 4285–4290). European Language Resources Association.

Felice, M., Taslimipoor, S., & Buttery, P. (2022). Constructing open cloze tests using generation and discrimination capabilities of transformers. In S. Muresan, & P.  Nakov, & A. Villavicencio (Eds.), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (pp. 1263–1273). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Felice, M., & Buttery, P. (2019). Entropy as a proxy for gap complexity in open cloze tests. In R. Mitkov, & G. Angelova (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019) (pp. 323–327). INCOMA Ltd.  

Bryant, C., Felice, M., Andersen, Ø. E., & Briscoe, T. (2019). The BEA-2019 shared task on grammatical error correction. In H. Yannakoudakis, E. Kochmar, C. Leacock, N. Madnani, I. Pilán, & T. Zesch (Eds.), Proceedings of The 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 52–75). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rei, M., Felice, M., Yuan, Z., & Briscoe, T. (2017). Artificial Error Generation with Machine Translation and Syntactic Patterns. In J. Tetreault, J. Burstein, C. Leacock, & H. Yannakoudakis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th workshop on innovative use of NLP for building educational applications (pp. 287–292). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bryant, C., Felice, M., & Briscoe, T. (2017). Automatic Annotation and Evaluation of Error Types for Grammatical Error Correction. In R. Barzilay, & M. Kan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), (pp. 793–805). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Education

  • PhD, Computer Science, University of Cambridge, 2016.
  • Erasmus Mundus International Masters, Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technologies, University of Wolverhampton, 2012
  • Erasmus Mundus International Masters, Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technologies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2011
  • BSc, Information Systems, Universidad Nacional de Luján, 2009
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