Edgar Casasola Murillo
Edgar Casasola Murillo works in one of the most relevant areas of artificial intelligence for a Spanish-speaking country: natural language processing in Spanish. He is a full professor in the School of Computer Science and Informatics (ECCI) at the University of Costa Rica (UCR).
Key facts
- Institution: University of Costa Rica (UCR), School of Computer Science and Informatics.
- Role: Full professor.
- Field: Natural language processing, information retrieval, computational linguistics, sentiment analysis in Spanish.
- Education: Master’s in Computer Science (University of Kansas, United States) and a doctorate.
Why he is a leader
Most large language models are trained and evaluated with English in mind first. Spanish, spoken by hundreds of millions of people, often comes second. Researchers like Casasola work to close that gap from within academia.
His work spans automatic sentiment analysis in Spanish, information retrieval, and computational linguistics, areas that allow machines not just to process text, but to understand it in its cultural context. He organized the first Costa Rican Colloquium on Natural Language Processing, an effort to bring the local community together around this specialty.
His contribution to the ecosystem
Building expertise in language processing within UCR means preparing those who will tomorrow build assistants, search engines, and tools that truly work in Costa Rican Spanish, with its idioms and nuances. It is a quiet but strategic investment so the country’s AI does not depend entirely on solutions designed for other languages.
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Edgar Casasola Murillo?
- He is a full professor in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University of Costa Rica, specializing in natural language processing, information retrieval, and computational linguistics.
- What is natural language processing?
- It is the area of artificial intelligence that allows machines to analyze and understand human language. Casasola researches its application to Spanish, including automatic sentiment analysis.