Sandro Pezzelle

Assistant Professor in Responsible AI at the ILLC, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam. Affiliated with the Dialogue Modelling Group. My research combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, 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 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 NLP models represent words, phrases, and sentences (in context)
• Language and vision: reasoning, linguistic, and communicative abilities of visually-grounded models
• Cognitive mechanisms in human semantics: how speakers acquire, use, and adapt their mental representations
• Interlocutor-aware text generation: can NLG models tune their style or knowledge to that of an interlocutor?
• Model interpretability: how and where large language models store their knowledge and skills

News

• 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'm 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!
• May 2023: Our paper Speaking the Language of Your Listener: Audience-Aware Adaptation via Plug-and-Play Theory of Mind led by Ece Takmaz and Nicolo' Brandizzi has been accepted to appear in the Findings of ACL 2023! Check out the preprint!
• April 2023: I will attend (and present a paper at) EACL 2023 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Get in touch if you'd like to have a chat at the conference!
• February 2023: The preprint of our EACL 2023 paper A Psycholinguistic Analysis of BERT's Representations of Compounds is now available on arXiv!
• February 2023: Our paper Semantic adaptation to the interpretation of gradable adjectives via active linguistic interaction is out in open access! Check it out!
• January 2023: Happy to share that two papers from our group were accepted at EACL 2023 (main conference)!