About Me

I am currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley Linguistics (starting August 2024).

I got a BA in Modern Languages with a focus on English Studies at the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain). I got my MA in Romance Languages (Spanish Linguistics) at the University of Alabama.

Currently, my research is focused on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Inside these areas, I study new methods to make low-resource langauges (LRLs) more present in modern language technologies such as large language models' (LLMs). I am also interested at the intersection between linguistics, cognition, and technology. Through these disciplines, I aim at understanding how humans learn and process language and how we can use this knowledge to improve language modeling.

I am the founder of the Visibility Project, a project to map endangered languages and drive their NLP research. I have also made significant contributions to the AYA project by Cohere for AI.

Research

Parra, I. (2024). Morphological Typology in BPE Subword Productivity and Language Modeling. NeurIPS 2024
Parra, I. (2024). Noise Be Gone: Does Speech Enhancement Distort Linguistic Nuances? ACL 2024
Parra, I. (2023). UnMASKed: Quantifying Gender Biases in Language Models through Linguistically Informed Job Market Queries. EACL 2024
Parra, I. (2023). Do You Speak Basquenglish? Assessing Low-resource Multilingual Proficiency of Pretrained Language Models. EMNLP 2023
Parra, I. (2023). The Turing Test Meets Dungeons & Dragons: A Comparative Study of Role-Playing and Standard Prompts in Language Models. (Under Review)
Koronkiewicz, B.; VanMeter, R.; Parra, I. (2023). Asymmetrical p-stranding: Acceptability Data from Spanish-English Code-switching. (In prep.)
Parra, I. (2020). Language and Opinion Online: Beliefs on COVID-19 and Socio-political Implications. (Undergraduate thesis)

Projects

The Visibility Project

The Visibility Project is an interactive map to locate endangered or low-resource languages (LRLs). It has a focus on natural language processing; we aim at making LRLs more visible and drag attention for their research. Each language is represented by a marker on the map, the bigger the size, the more speakers it has. The color represents the NLP attention it receives. Clicking on a marker will display a popup with information about the language. The popup also contains a link to the language's NLP papers, if available.

Visit the Visibility Project

AYA: Cohere For AI

I collaborated in the development of AYA, an initiative to accelerate multilingual AI progress. It is part of Cohere for AI, a project to make AI more accessible. I was the ambassador and main contributor for the Basque language. As such, I was in charge of social social-media news and updates for this language and the translation of official documents of the project. Apart from Basque, I also contributed to Spanish and English.

News on this! Aya is now an open source SOTA multilingual dataset. It is now vailable on Huggingface🤗 Datasets! Cohere's and C4AI new open source model, ⌘R+, was trained with our work! The model is now available on Huggingface🤗 Models!

AYA

Other Interests

I like cooking, staying active, and photography. I am also a huge fan of house and latin music. These are some moments I enjoyed in the past!

Music

In my free time I also make music. Here are some of my songs!