Alon Lavie

Dr. Alon Lavie serves as the Vice President of AI Research at Phrase, where he oversees the AI research teams in the US and Europe. He provides strategic leadership in AI research and development (R&D) and product development across the company. Prior to his current role, he was Vice President of Language Technologies at Unbabel, leading the company-wide AI R&D with a focus on Translation Quality Technologies. From June 2015 to March 2019, Alon led the Amazon Machine Translation R&D group in Pittsburgh. In 2009, he co-founded Safaba Translation Solutions, where he held multiple leadership positions including Chairman of the Board, President, and CTO until its acquisition by Amazon in 2015. Safaba was renowned for developing advanced automated translation solutions that catered to large global enterprises. Alon has had a distinguished tenure as a Research Professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, spanning nearly two decades from 1996 to 2015. He continues to engage with the institute as an adjunct Consulting Professor. His research interests are centered on Translation Quality Estimation and Evaluation, particularly the METEOR and COMET metrics, and include the development of Machine Translation adaptation techniques. He is a prolific scholar, having authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed papers and publications. Alon is a trusted expert on machine translation and has been at the leading edge of AI research in language technology for more than 20 years. In his leadership capacity, Alon has served as President of the International Association for Machine Translation (2013-2015) and the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (2008-2012). He was also the President of SIGParse, the ACL's special interest group on parsing technology (2008-2013). In recognition of his contributions to the field of Machine Translation, Alon was honored with the 2021 Makoto Nagao IAMT Award of Honour at the 18th biennial Machine Translation Summit conference.