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. As such, 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, TACL, Cognition, and Cognitive Science.

Before, I was a Postdoc within the DREAM (Distributed dynamic REpresentations for diAlogue Management) ERC project led by Raquel Fernández. And, before, a PhD candidate 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 affiliated with the Dialogue Modelling Group, a member of the ELLIS society, a faculty member of the ELLIS Amsterdam Unit, and a board member of SigSem, the ACL special interest group in computational semantics. I am part of TACL editorial team.

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

• 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!
• February 2024: I will be visiting Marco Baroni and Gemma Boleda at UPF from February 19 to March 1! Please reach out if you are based in Barcelona and want to connect/invite me for a talk!
• January 2024: I am thrilled to share that our paper Describing Images Fast and Slow: Quantifying and Predicting the Variation in Human Signals during Visuo-Linguistic Processes led by Ece Takmaz has been accepted to EACL 2024 (main conference)!
• October 2023: I am more than proud to share that 3 papers from my group have been accepted to appear in the Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (main conference)! Congratulations Aditya, Michael, and Xinyi on your well-deserved achievement!
• August 2023: Excited to announce that I'll be one of the keynote speakers at the Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation (MM-NLG) co-located with INLG and SIGDial 2023 on September 12!
• June 2023: Look forward to giving a talk on Semantic representations of words in (multimodal) masked language models at the eScience Center in Amsterdam on June 15!
• June 2023: Great to hear that the project proposal HUE: bridging AI representations to Human-Understandable Explanations by me and Giovanni Cinà has been awarded a Responsible Digital Transformation seed grant by the University of Amsterdam. Look forward to starting this collaboration!
• June 2023: Thrilled to be one of the next invited speakers of the CBS Research Seminar at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on July 5! Many thanks for inviting me!
• May 2023: Excited to be one of the keynote speakers of the Linguistic Insights from and for Multimodal Language Processing (LIMO) workshop co-located with KONVENS. See you in Ingolstadt on September 22!
• May 2023: I am proud to share that my single-authored position paper Dealing with Semantic Underspecification in Multimodal NLP has been accepted at ACL 2023 (main conference)! Check out the preprint!

Press

• Our HUE project on XAI and model interpretability is talked about on Innovation Origins!
• Giovanni Cinà and I were interviewed by the UvA on our HUE project on XAI and model interpretability!