Sandro Pezzelle

Assistant Professor in Responsible AI at the ILLC, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam. Studying, teaching, and advancing language-mediated intelligence in humans and machines. My research combines insights and methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine and Deep Learning, and Cognitive Science (see my current Research lines below). I published in ACL, EACL, EMNLP, NAACL, CoLM, TACL, Cognition, and Cognitive Science.

Before, I worked as a Postdoc within the DREAM (Distributed dynamic REpresentations for diAlogue Management) ERC project led by Raquel Fernández. And, before, I did a PhD at CIMeC, University of Trento, under the supervision of Raffaella Bernardi (check QUANTIT-CLIC for some of my PhD work). In 2018, I was research intern at SAP AI Research.

I am a member of the Center for Explainable, Responsible, and Theory-Driven Artificial Intelligence (CERTAIN), a faculty member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), a board member of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics (SigSem), and a Scientific Advisor at IVADO Labs.

Research lines

Some topics I am interested in (contact me for theses and collaborations!)

• Computational semantics and pragmatics: how Large Language Models represent words, phrases, and sentences (in context)
• Language and vision: reasoning, linguistic, and communicative abilities of visually-grounded LLMs
• Cognitive mechanisms in human semantics: how speakers acquire, use, and adapt their mental representations
• Interlocutor-aware text generation: can LLMs tune their style or knowledge to that of an interlocutor?
• Behavioral and mechanistic interpretability: what are the abilities of LLMs and where/how they occur in the computational graph

News

• March 2025: Excited to share that our preprint Are formal and functional linguistic mechanisms dissociated in language models? is available on arXiv! Check it out if you're curious to know if the mechanistic circuits found in LLMs mirror the dissociations observed in human brains!
• February 2025: Happy to share that I am now a Scientific Advisor at IVADO Labs!
• September 2024: Happy to share that our work Not (yet) the whole story: Evaluating Visual Storytelling Requires More than Measuring Coherence, Grounding, and Repetition will appear in the Findings of EMNLP 2024! Congrats, Aditya, for your second paper at EMNLP!
• September 2024: I'm thrilled to be one of the keynote speakers of the MultiplEYE mid-term Conference (MuMiCo) in Tirana on September 13! Look forward to attending the conference!
• September 2024: Happy to welcome Walter Paci, PhD candidate at the University of Florence, to our lab! For the coming four months, Walter will be be working with me and the DMG on language implicitness and underspecification! Great to have you here!
• August 2024: A nice batch of invited/keynote talks this autumn! I will be a keynote speaker of MuMiCo 2024 in Tirana (September), a keynote speaker of the Perspectives in NLP x Social Sciences, Cognition, and Humanities workshop in Aarhus (October), and an invited speaker of the CLASP seminar in Gothenburg (December). Look forward to them!
• July 2024: Honored to be one of the keynote speakers of the CMCL workshop at ACL 2024 in Bangkok! Looking forward to being there!
• July 2024: Our preprint LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks is now on arXiv. Check it out!
• May 2024: I am more than proud to share that 2 papers from our group have been accepted to appear in the Proceedings of ACL 2024! Congratulations Frank, Michael, Alberto, and Juell on your well-deserved achievement!
• March 2024: It was great to give a talk and connect with researchers at Amazon AI Barcelona! Thanks, Laura Aina, Ionut Sorodoc, and Diego Marcheggiani for inviting me!

Press

• Feb 2025. Our paper "From Tools to Teammates: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-Session Coding Interactions" in collaboration with Cohere and Cohere4AI was featured in the Cohere Research blog!
• Feb 2025. I was interviewed for Folia, the magazine for, about, and by students, faculty, and staff of the University of Amsterdam! You can read the article "UvA scientists outsource expensive and boring tasks to AI – how responsible is that?" here!
• Feb 2025. I was interviewed for the Dutch magazine Kijk! You can find the article (in Dutch) "AI feeds on its own mistakes – and that causes problems" online and in the February issue of the magazine!
• July 2024. Our HUE project on XAI and model interpretability is talked about on Innovation Origins! You can read the article "New research project aims to make AI explainable to humans" here!
• July 2024. Giovanni Cinà and I were interviewed by the University of Amsterdam about "Developing a method to make AI explainable to humans". You can read the article here!