Esaú VILLATORO

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Short Biography

Dr. Villatoro-Tello is a researcher in the Speech and Audio Processing Group at the Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland, where he has worked since September 2019. From June 2012 to December 2022, he held a tenured position at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa (UAM-C) in Mexico City.

With more than 15 years of experience in Computer Science, Dr. Villatoro-Tello has contributed extensively to the fields of Computational Linguistics (CL), Information Retrieval (IR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). His recent research focuses on the intersection of NLP and the Social Sciences, with applications in Mental Health, Authorship Analysis (AA), Natural and Spoken Language Understanding (NLU/SLU), Semantic Analysis (SA), and News Media Profiling.

He has authored over 100 publications, including conference papers, journal articles, and book editions. In addition, he has supervised the thesis work of more than 28 students at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD levels.

Dr. Villatoro-Tello has served as a Program Committee member for major NLP conferences such as ACL, EACL, EMNLP, COLING, NAACL, LREC, CoNLL, IJCNLP, and CLEF, and is a regular Area Chair for the ACL Rolling Review System. He was also part of the organizing committee of the Mexican NLP Summer School, co-located with NAACL in 2021 and 2024.

As Principal Investigator (PI), he has coordinated more than five projects funded by the Mexican National Council of Research (CONACyT). Most recently, he was awarded a grant (2025–2029) by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to advance novel AI technologies for mental health and well-being.

If you are interested, you can review my personal web page here.

You can check my latest publications since I started working at Idiap here.

Education

I hold a Ph. D. in Computer Science. Since year 2004 I’ve been working in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) area. Some of the particular sub-problems of NLP in which I’m interested and I’ve done some work are: 

  • Author Profiling (Sexual Predators Identification/Personality identification/ Mental health disorders identification)
  • Plagiarism Detection (Source Code Plagiarism Identification)
  • Sentiment Analysis (Opinion mining)
  • Single and Multiple Document Summarization
  • Information Retrieval (Geographic)
  • Automatic Speaker Identification
  • Question Answering Systems
  • Information Extraction from unstructured Texts
  • Automatic Text Classification

Current Projects

  • tOwards undeRstanding and modelIng the language of mENTal health disordERs (ORIENTER). See here for a brief description. SNSF Data portal: here.
  • Multilingual and Cross-cultural interactions for context-aware, and bias-controlled dialogue systems for safety-critical applications (ELOQUENCE). See here for a brief description. Official ELOQUENCE website: here.

Past Projects

  • Comprehensive data-driven Risk and Threat Assessment Methods for the Early and Reliable Identification, Validation and Analysis of migration-related risks (CRITERIA). See here for a brief description.
  • Real time network, text, and speaker analytics for combating organized crime (ROXANNE): See here for a brief description.
  • Summarization and domain-Adaptive Retrieval of Information Across Languages (SARAL): See here for project description.

Tel: +41277217CP307-2
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