Sandro Pezzelle

Work

Sep 2021 - present: Assistant Professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence at ILLC, University of Amsterdam.
Jan 2019 - Aug 2021: Postdoc researcher at ILLC, University of Amsterdam.
Jun - Dec 2018: Research intern at SAP AI Research, Berlin.
Feb - Jun 2017: Part-time Language Specialist at Appen.
2010 - 2014: Newspaper Contributor at Corriere del Veneto and Corriere Innovazione.

Education

2015 - 2018: PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at CLIC Lab at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Italy. Master thesis: Learning the Meaning of Quantifiers from Language and Vision. Supervisor: Raffaella Bernardi. Oversight Committee: Raffaella Bernardi, Manuela Piazza, Roberto Zamparelli, Marco Baroni (former). Grade: passed cum laude.
2012 - 2015: MSc in Linguistics at DISLL, University of Padova, Italy. Master thesis: Generating Meaning Representations for Compound Words: A new Perspective from Compositional Distributional Semantics. Supervisors: Marco Marelli (CIMeC, Unitn), Laura Vanelli (DISLL, Unipd). Grade: 110/110 cum laude.

Teaching

Sep-Oct 2023: Coordinator and lecturer of MSc BCS Higher Cognitive Functions course, University of Amsterdam.
Apr-May 2023: Coordinator and lecturer of BSc AI Taaltheorie en Taalverwerking course, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2023: Lecture at MSc AI Natural Language Processing 2 course (Coordinator: Khalil Sima'an) on Semantic representations of words in masked language models, University of Amsterdam.
March 2023: Lecture at BSc AI Language, Speech and Dialogue Processing (Coordinator: Wilker Aziz) on An introduction to visually-grounded language modeling and Image Captioning.
Sep-Oct 2022: Coordinator and lecturer of MSc BCS Higher Cognitive Functions course, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2022: Lecture at MSc AI Natural Language Processing 2 course (Coordinator: Khalil Sima'an) on Visually-grounded semantics in multimodal pre-trained Transformers, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2022: Guest lecture at MSc CS Machine Learning for NLP course (Lecturer: Aurelie Herbelot) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models, University of Trento.
Nov-Dec 2021: Coordinator and lecturer (with Wilker Aziz) of MSc AI Natural Language Processing 1 course, University of Amsterdam.
Sep-Oct 2021: Coordinator and lecturer of MSc BCS Higher Cognitive Functions course, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2021: Lecture at MSc AI Computational Dialogue Modelling course (Lecturer: R. Fernández) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models, University of Amsterdam.
Feb 2021: Lecture at MSc AI Natural Language Processing 2 course (Coordinator: Khalil Sima'an) on Modeling Gradable Adjectives Leveraging Visual Contexts, University of Amsterdam.
May 2020: Guest lecture at MSc MoL Structures for Semantics course (Lecturer: M. Aloni) on Learning the Visually-Grounded Meaning of Quantifiers, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2020: Lecture at MSc AI Natural Language Processing 2 course (Coordinator: Elia Bruni) on Modeling Gradable Adjectives Leveraging Visual Contexts, University of Amsterdam.
Apr 2020: Lecture at MSc AI Computational Dialogue Modelling course (Lecturer: R. Fernández) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models, University of Amsterdam.
Nov 2019: Lecture at MSc AI Natural Language Processing 1 course (Lecturer: E. Shutova) on Compositional semantics and sentence representations with Neural Networks, University of Amsterdam.
Oct-Dec 2019: Teaching Assistant Coordinator for MSc AI Natural Language Processing 1 course (Lecturer: E. Shutova), University of Amsterdam.
Mar 2019: Guest lecture at MSc AI on Learning the Meaning of Quantifiers from Language and Vision (Lecturer: D. Paperno), University of Utrecht.
Nov 2018: Teaching Assistant for MSc CS Computational Linguistics course (Lecturer: R. Bernardi), University of Trento. [get-ready] [notes14nov] [notes16nov] [hands-on]
May 2018: Disseminative guest lecture at Liceo Scientifico N. Tron, Schio, on Counting Pascoli: Computational Linguistics Applied to Poetry.
Nov 2017: Teaching Assistant for MSc CS Computational Linguistics course (Lecturer: R. Bernardi), University of Trento. [notes8nov] [notes9nov] [bin2pkl] [vectors] [hands-on]

Current lab members and collaborators

2022 - : Michael Hanna (UvA), PhD candidate, co-supervised with Yonatan Belinkov (Technion)
2022 - : Aditya Surikuchi (UvA), PhD candidate, co-supervised with Jos Bosch (UvA) and Raquel Fernandez (UvA)
2019 - : Ece Takmaz (UvA), PhD candidate, co-supervised with Raquel Fernandez (UvA)
2022 - : Felix van Deelen (NOS), former MSc Data Science student, collaborating with me and Tom van den Broek (NOS)
2021 - : Xinyi Chen, former MSc Artificial Intelligence student, collaborating with me and Raquel Fernandez
2022 - : Yuyu Bai (VU Amsterdam), MSc Artificial Intelligence student -- thesis
2022 - : Angela van Sprang (UvA), MSc Artificial Intelligence student, co-supervised with Jelle Zuidema -- thesis
2023 - : Frank Wildenburg (UvA), MSc Logic student -- thesis
2023 - : Ilke Asal (UvA), MSc Brain and Cognitive Science student -- research internship
2023 - : Torrey Snyder (UvA), MSc Brain and Cognitive Science student -- research internship

Past (co-)supervision

2022: Felix van Deelen, MSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Image Captioning in the context of Dutch news
2022: Xinyi Chen, MSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Language and Reasoning abilities of pre-trained language models
2022: Rutger van Woerkom, MSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Classifying and identifying SDGs in texts
2022: Lars Buijtelaar, BSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Lexical semantics in pre-trained Transformers
2021: Lennert Jansen, MSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): A Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adaptive Dialogue Generation
2020: Eleonora Gualdoni, MSc thesis (University of Trento): Exploring the language of grounded and ungrounded referring expressions in human dialogues
2020: Yulya Parfenova, MSc thesis (VU Amsterdam): Reasoning about Objects' Size: An Odd-One-Out Approach to Visual Question Answering
2019: Ece Takmaz, MSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Enhancing neural image captioning with eye-tracking
2019: Jurre Wolsink, BSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Exploring the contribution of semantic information in stance detection
2019: Amos Bastian, BSc thesis (University of Amsterdam): Irony Detection in Tweets
2018: Ionut T. Sorodoc, research assistant (University of Trento): Learning Quantification from Images: A Structured Neural Architecture
2018: Alberto Testoni, MSc student project (University of Trento): Quantifiers in Vision, Language, and Sound
2018: Marta Cristofanini, MSc student project (University of Trento): Semantic Similarity of Quantifiers
2017: David Addison Smith, MSc student project (University of Trento): Exploring the Mass/Count Distinction in Vision

Service

2024: Co-organizer of the UnImplicit workshop at EACL 2024 and the RepL4NLP workshop at ACL 2024
2024: Reviewer for LREC-Coling, TACL
2023: Reviewer for ACL, IWCS, TACL, WUPS
2022: Reviewer for ARR, *SEM @NAACL, COLING, TACL
2022: Action Editor for NAACL
2021: Co-organizer of the third edition of LANTERN @EACL
2021: Reviewer for EACL, NAACL, CMCL @NAACL, CoNLL @EMNLP, EMNLP, *SEM @ACL-IJCNLP, IWCS, TACL, ARR
2020: Commentator on Aishwarya Agrawal's keynote talk at GeCKo symposium
2020: Program co-Chair of EurNLP2020 (moved to 2021)
2020: Co-organizer of the second edition of LANTERN @COLING
2020: Reviewer for ACL, GeCKo, EMNLP, AACL-IJCNLP, CoNLL
2019: Co-organizer of LANTERN, The First Workshop Beyond Vision and LANguage: InTEgrating Real World KNowledge @EMNLP-IJCNLP
2019: Reviewer for ACL, EMNLP-IJCNLP, NeurIPS, CogSci, CoNLL, IWCS, SiVL @NAACL-HLT, CLiC-it
2018: Reviewer for EMNLP, *SEM @NAACL-HLT, SiVL @ECCV
2017: Publication Chair of *SEM @ACL
2017: Reviewer for ESSLLI Student Session

Awards and grants

2023. Responsible Digital Transformation seed grant. Project: HUE: bridging AI representations to Human-Understandable Explanations. Collaborators: Giovanni Cinà
2021. Outstanding reviewer of EACL 2021
2020. RPA Human(e) AI seed funding. Project: Exploring Adaptation of Conversational Systems to Different Age Groups. Collaborators: Margot van der Goot, Raquel Fernández
2019. Top reviewer of NeurIPS 2019
2017. STSM Grant by COST Action IC1307 for a 35-day research period at UvA, The Netherlands
2017. COST Action IC1307 travel grant for iV&L Training School 2017, Athens, Greece
2017. EACL 2017 Studentship, Valencia, Spain
2016. COST Action IC1307 travel grant for VL'16 at ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany
2016. EUREGIO grant covering all expenses for ESSLLI 2016, Bolzano, Italy
2014. ERASMUS Program Scholarship for 6-month exchange at UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium