[5][6] Her research investigates data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP).
[7][8] Specia earned her PhD in computer science at the University of São Paulo in 2007 supervised by Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes [pt][9] from the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC).
[11] She took up a joint appointment at the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.
She developed QuEst, an open source software tool used for quality estimation for machine translation.
[14] In 2016 Specia was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to use multi-modal information as an input for machine learning algorithms.