Towards User-intent aware Multimodal Retrieval

This eBay-funded project aims to develop a comprehensive framework to support vision–language (V–L) research within eBay.

Start date

April 2025

End date

March 2027

Overview

With this project, we aim to create a framework to support vision-language (V-L) research within eBay. We will develop a framework leveraging existing pre-trained vision-language models to improve the performance of matching listings with existing products, and for tasks like product listing moderation, attribute extraction, explained relevance prediction. This framework can later also serve as a testbed for customer support chatbots with image understanding and image-based product search.

People

Principal investigator

Dr Diptesh Kanojia

Senior Lecturer in People-Centred AI

d.kanojia@surrey.ac.uk

Co-Investigator

Professor Constantin Orasan

Professor of Language and Translation Technologies

Biography

I am Professor of Language and Translation Technologies at the Centre of Translation Studies, University of Surrey, UK, and a Fellow of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Before starting this role, I was Reader (Associate Professor) in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and the deputy head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the same university. I hold a PhD in computational linguistics and a BSc in computer science.

With over 25 years of experience in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Linguistics, I have established myself as a leading researcher in the development of technologies that facilitate access to information. My PhD was in automatic summarisation, and I have led projects on question answering, text simplification, and translation technologies. Notable projects that I have led are EmpASR, an AHRC-funded project focused on training interpreters on how to benefit from the latest developments in artificial intelligence; HarnessingNLP4Court, a UKRI-funded project focused on facilitating access to legal information; the EXPERT project, an Initial Training Network (ITN) funded under the EU’s FP7 to train the next generation of world-class researchers in the field of data-driven translation technology; and the FIRST project, which developed language technologies for making texts more accessible to people with autism.

My current research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersection of AI, NLP, and translation studies. In recent years, I have increasingly focused on the practical application of NLP to support translators and interpreters. My recent publications explore reference-less translation evaluation, the processing of multilingual content in low-resource settings, the use of automatic speech recognition to support interpreters, and the use of large language models in text accessibility. My research is well known as a result of over 150 peer-reviewed articles in journals, books, and international conferences.

I am currently leading an EPSRC-funded project focused on making science accessible, and I am Co-Director of the ADA Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Network. More information about my work can be found at https://dinel.org.uk/.

See profile