Four years after the launch of the first Call for Affiliated Ph.D. Programs in 2021, John Mendonça became the first CMU Portugal Program alum. John was one of twelve candidates selected in the initiative’s inaugural edition and has now successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on December 12th, 2025, at Instituto Superior Técnico.
“Becoming the first graduate of the CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. Program is a great honour for me. Being able to conduct research at both IST and CMU fostered both intellectual growth and collaboration, which I found was essential to advancing my work on multilingual dialogue evaluation.”- John Mendonça.
The current doctor in Electrical and Computer Engineering was co-supervised by Isabel Trancoso (Técnico / INESC-ID) and Alon Lavie (Carnegie Mellon Language Technologies Institute).
His thesis, “Multilingual Automatic Dialogue Evaluation”, addresses the challenges of evaluating modern dialogue systems in an era dominated by large language models. The main goal of the research was to develop a comprehensive and multilingual framework capable of assessing diverse aspects of dialogue quality efficiently and reliably. The work investigates how to model nuanced conversational qualities—such as coherence, contextual relevance, and reasoning—while ensuring scalability across languages and evaluation settings.
During his Ph.D. work John worked with an ICT company, something he considers a bonus to any Ph.D., as John says,“ it helps ground our research in the real world. This is especially important if you are interested in working in the industry after your studies.”
During his Ph.D., John Mendonça worked on the CMU Portugal Large-Scale project MAIA, led by Unbabel, where he focused on developing Intelligent AI Agents for chatbots.
Now with his Ph.D. completed, John is looking toward the future and defining the next steps of his professional journey:
“Looking ahead, I intend to continue my research career in the industry, where I can directly apply my work to real-world challenges in dialogue systems. I believe the industry setting provides unique opportunities to translate research into practical innovations. In particular, it opens the door to exploring personalized evaluation, which is an emerging topic that I’m interested in working on and that benefits greatly from the richer interaction data and deployment contexts available in industrial settings.”, John Mendonça.
Back in 2022, John had already shared his insights in an interview for our website, regarding his experience with both the MAIA project and the Affiliated Ph.D. Program, available to read here.
The Affiliated Ph.D. Initiative currently supports 51 active students and has admitted a total of 59 Ph.D. candidates since its launch in 2021 – 12 students in 2021/2022, 2022/2023 and 2023/2024, 10 in 2024/2025, and 13 in 2025/2026.