Rate My Professor Leonardo Zilio

Leonardo Zilio serves as an assistant professor in translation and interpreting technologies at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters (FIAL) and the Institute for Language and Communication (ILC). His academic journey began with a Bachelor's degree in Translation (Portuguese-German) from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in 2006, followed by a Master's in Language Studies and a PhD in Linguistics from the same institution, completed between 2011 and 2015. Following his doctorate, Zilio held a post-doctoral position at the Instituto de Informática, UFRGS, from August 2015 to August 2016. He joined UCLouvain in 2016 and has also conducted post-doctoral research at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), including a recent stint from May 2023 to July 2024. Zilio's research specializations encompass computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), terminology, digital humanities, historical linguistics, and applications in translation technologies and second language acquisition.

Zilio has made notable contributions to NLP, particularly for Portuguese and historical texts. Key publications include 'PassPort: A Dependency Parsing Model for Portuguese' (2018, with Rodrigo Wilkens and Cédrick Fairon), 'Enhancing grammatical structures in web-based texts' (2017, with Cédrick Fairon), 'SW4ALL: a CEFR-Classified and Aligned Corpus for Language Learning' (2018, with Rodrigo Wilkens and Cédrick Fairon), 'Using Neural Machine Translation for Normalising Historical Documents' (2024, with Besim Kabashi), and 'NLP for historical Portuguese: Analysing 18th-century texts' (2024). His work appears in prestigious venues such as PROPOR, ACL, and eLex, with over 396 citations on Google Scholar. At UCLouvain, he teaches courses including Revision and Post-editing (LTRAD2200), The Founding Principles of Interpretation (LINTP2000), and modules on linguistics and artificial intelligence. Zilio contributes to the academic community as Internal Communications Chair for EACL 2026, organizer of workshops on Digital Humanities and NLP, and supervisor of PhD students in computational linguistics and translation. His research influences machine translation, historical document processing, and language learning tools.