Ayla Rigouts Terryn is an Assistant Professor of Translation Technologies and AI in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at Université de Montréal and an Associate Academic Member at Mila. She is also an IVADO professor and holds the IVADO-FRQ chair "At the Crossroads of Languages and AI: Towards a Synergy Between Language Expertise and Computational Innovation". As a linguist in the field of AI, she is passionate about advancing our understanding of language models with linguistic insight. She explores NLP in multilingual and non-English contexts (including low-resource scenarios), nuanced analysis and evaluation of large language models, and translation technology for domain-specific texts and terminology.

Between 2022 and 2024 Ayla worked as a tenure track lecturer in Translation Science: translation and interpreting technology at KU Leuven campus Kortrijk. She conducted research on language technology for domain-specific texts, such as monolingual and multilingual automatic term extraction and other terminological support for translators and interpreters.

Previously, Ayla Rigouts Terryn was a doctoral assistant (postdoctoral researcher) at the LT3 Language and Translation Technology Team at UGent. She has a background in translation (NL, EN, FR, DE) and researches supervised machine-learning approaches for automatic terminology extraction, in single language and multilingual. She is interested in language and translation technology in general, and specifically in computational research on terminology.

As part of her PhD project, she created the open-source ACTER dataset (Annotated Corpora for Term Extraction Research), organised the TermEval competition based on the dataset, and developed and compared three different new methodologies for automatic term extraction. She also worked on several projects specifically focused on medical terminology.

She started research on revision competence in translation at the University of Antwerp.