Hugo Zaragoza leads the Natural Language Retrieval group in Barcelona. He is interested in the applications of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) for information retrieval (IR), Web search, and information access in general.

From 2001 to 2006, Hugo worked at Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK) with Stephen Robertson, mostly on probabilistic ranking methods for corporate and web search, but also on document classification, expert finding, relevance feedback, and dialogue generation for games. He also collaborated with Microsoft product groups MSN-Search and SharePoint Portal Server.

Prior to Microsoft Research, Hugo taught computer science and completed a Ph.D. at the LIP6 (U. Paris 6) on the application of dynamic probabilistic models to a wide range of Information Access problems.