Hugo Sousa

Applied Scientist @ Amazon

News

  • Temporal Game paper was accepted at CIKM'25
  • Joined Amazon as an Applied Scientist
  • Two papers accepted at AAAI'25
  • Event-based search paper was accepted at WSDM'25
  • Spent the summer in Palo Alto as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon
  • Physio won the đŸ„‡ Best Demo Award đŸ„‡ at ECIR'24

I am an applied scientist at Amazon. My research interest is mainly focused on machine learning with a specific focus on natural language processing. In particular, the focus of my current research - and of my PhD - is on the temporal reasoning capabilities of language models. That is, how do language models "understand" and "manipulate" temporal information (I try to be careful with words). Besides that, I am a deep reinforcement learning `aficionado` despite all its challenging and complex features.

My bachelor's is in Physics and my master's is in Applied Mathematics, so we can talk about that if that is of your interest.

Publications

The Temporal Game: A New Perspective on Temporal Relation Extraction

Hugo Sousa, Ricardo Campos, AlĂ­pio Jorge

CIKM, November 10-14, 2025, Seoul, Korea

paper | poster

Tradutor: Building a Variety Specific Translation Model

Hugo Sousa, Satya Almasian, Ricardo Campos, AlĂ­pio Jorge

AAAI, February 25 - March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

paper | poster

Enhancing Portuguese Variety Identification with Cross-Domain Approaches

Hugo Sousa, RĂșben Almeida, Purificação Silvano, InĂȘs Cantante, Ricardo Campos, AlĂ­pio Jorge

AAAI, February 25 - March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

paper | poster

Don't Forget This: Augmenting Results with Event-Aware Search

Hugo Sousa, Austin Ward, Omar Alonso

WSDM, 10-14 March 2025, Hannover, Germany

paper | poster

Text2Story Lusa: A Dataset for Narrative Analysis in European Portuguese News Articles

Sousa, H., Almeida, R., Silvano, P., Cantante, I., Campos, R., Jorge, A., Amorim, E., Leal, A., and Campos, R.

LREC-COLING, 20-25 May 2024, Torino, Italy

paper

Physio: An LLM-Based Physiotherapy Advisor

RĂșben Almeida, Hugo Sousa, LuĂ­s Cunha, Nuno GuimarĂŁes, AlĂ­pio Jorge, and Ricardo Campos

🏆 Best Demo Paper 🏆 ECIR, 24-28 March 2024, Glasgow, Scotland

paper

GPT Struct Me: Probing GPT Models on Narrative Entity Extraction

Hugo Sousa, Nuno GuimarĂŁes, AlĂ­pio Jorge, and Ricardo Campos

WI-IAT, 26-29 October 2023, Venice, Italy

paper | code

TEI2GO: A Multilingual Approach for Fast Temporal Expression Identification

Hugo Sousa, AlĂ­pio Jorge, Ricardo Campos, and Ricardo Campos

CIKM, 21-25 October 2023, Birmingham, United Kingdom

paper | code

tieval: An Evaluation Framework for Temporal Information Extraction Systems

Hugo Sousa, AlĂ­pio Jorge, and Ricardo Campos

SIGIR, 23-27 July 2023, Taipei, Taiwan

paper | code

A Biomedical Entity Extraction Pipeline for Oncology Health Records in Portuguese

Hugo Sousa, AlĂ­pio Jorge, and Ricardo Campos

ACM SAC, 27-31 March 2023, Tallinn, Estonia

paper

Temporal Relation Extraction: The Event Ordering Task

Hugo Sousa

DESIRES, 15-18 September 2021, Padua, Italy

paper

ECG Compression and QRS Detection: an IoT Approach

Hugo Sousa

Master Thesis, 2019

thesis

Talks

Principles for Developing Machine Learning Projects

Presented for master students in AI at the University of Porto

December 2025

Work

Applied Scientist
@ Amazon
June 2025 to …
Teaching Assistant
@ University Porto
February 2023 to …
Applied Scientist Intern
@ Amazon
June 2024 to September 2024
Visting PhD Student
@ Carnegie Mellon University
October 2023 to December 2023
PhD Student
@ University Porto
December 2020 to December 2025;
Research Assistant
@ INESC TEC
December 2020 to June 2025;
Data Scientist
@ BNP Paribas
December 2019 to December 2020
Data Scientist
@ JTA: The Data Scientists
July 2018 to April 2019

Education

2020-2025 (expected)
PhD, Computer Science; University of Porto

As an FCT Grant holder and part of the Text2Story project. Advised by Professor AlĂ­pio Jorge and Professor Ricardo Campos.

2017-2019
MS, Applied Mathematics; University of Porto

Thesis title: ECG Compression and QRS Detection: an IoT Approach

2014-2017
BSc, Physics; University of Porto

Other

đŸ„‰ Sword AI Challenge 15-23 July 2023
Member of the team - Team Physio - that took 3Âș place on Sword AI Challenge 2023.

IACT’23 @SIGIR 27 July 2023
Web and Dissemination Chair of the IACT Workshop.

Text2Story'23 @ECIR 2 April 2023
Web and Dissemination Chair of the Text2Story Workshop.

ESSIR 2022 18-22 July 2022
Attended the European Summer School in Information Retrieval.

Text2Story'22 @ECIR 10 April 2022
Web and Dissemination Chair of the Text2Story Workshop.

đŸ„‡ GENTIL Project 2021
Part of the team that developed the natural language processing pipeline for the GENTIL porject. This project was recognized as the "Best Future of Work Project" on Portugal Digital Awards 2021.

DSAA21 6-9 October 2021
Volunteer.

DESIRES 2021 15-18 September 2021
Went to the beautiful city of Padua to participate on the DESIRES 2021 conference.

LxMLS 2021 7-15 July 2021
Attended the Lisbon Summer School 2021.

Eurekathon 2020 5-7 November 2020
Member of the team - Feeding the Future - that took 2Âș place on Eurekathon 2020.