Work
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 2022 : Coordinator of BCS MSc Higher Cognitive Functions course, University of Amsterdam.Apr 2022 : Lecture at AI MSc NLP2 (Coordinator: Khalil Sima'an) on Visually-grounded semantics in multimodal pre-trained Transformers , University of Amsterdam.Apr 2022 : Guest lecture at MSc Machine Learning for NLP (Lecturer: Aurelie Herbelot) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models , University of Trento.Nov-Dec 2021 : Coordinator, together with Wilker Aziz, of AI MSc NLP1 course, University of Amsterdam.Sep-Oct 2021 : Coordinator of BCS MSc Higher Cognitive Functions course, University of Amsterdam.Apr 2021 : Lecture at AI MSc Computational Dialogue Modelling (Lecturer: R. Fernández) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models , University of Amsterdam.Feb 2021 : Lecture at AI MSc NLP2 (Coordinator: Khalil Sima'an) on Modeling Gradable Adjectives Leveraging Visual Contexts , University of Amsterdam.May 2020 : Guest lecture at MoL MSc Structures for Semantics (Lecturer: M. Aloni) on Learning the Visually-Grounded Meaning of Quantifiers , University of Amsterdam.Apr 2020 : Lecture at AI MSc NLP2 (Coordinator: Elia Bruni) on Modeling Gradable Adjectives Leveraging Visual Contexts , University of Amsterdam.Apr 2020 : Lecture at AI MSc Computational Dialogue Modelling (Lecturer: R. Fernández) on Visually Grounded Language and Dialogue Models , University of Amsterdam.Nov 2019 : Lecture at AI MSc NLP1 (Lecturer: E. Shutova) on Compositional semantics and sentence representations with Neural Networks , University of Amsterdam.Oct-Dec 2019: Teaching Assistant Coordinator for AI MSc NLP1 (Lecturer: E. Shutova) , University of Amsterdam.Mar 2019: Guest lecture at AI MSc on Learning the Meaning of Quantifiers from Language and Vision (Lecturer: D. Paperno), University of Utrecht.Nov 2018: Teaching Assistant for MSc Computational Linguistics (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 Computational Linguistics (Lecturer: R. Bernardi) , University of Trento. [notes8nov] [notes9nov] [bin2pkl] [vectors] [hands-on]
(Co-)Supervision
2022 - present : Michael Hanna, PhD thesis (University of Amsterdam)
2022 - present : Aditya Surikuchi, PhD thesis (University of Amsterdam)
2019 - present : Ece Takmaz , PhD thesis (University of Amsterdam)
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
2021 : Co-organizer of the third edition of LANTERN 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 2020 : Reviewer for ACL, GeCKo, EMNLP, AACL-IJCNLP, CoNLL
2019 : Co-organizer of LANTERN , The First Workshop Beyond Vision and LANguage: InTEgrating Real World KNowledge2019 : Reviewer for ACL, EMNLP-IJCNLP, NeurIPS, CogSci, CoNLL, IWCS, SiVL @NAACL-HLT, CLiC-it
2018 : Reviewer for EMNLP, *SEM @NAACL-HLT, SiVL @ECCV2017 : Chair at *SEM @ACL2017 : Publication Chair of *SEM @ACL2017 : Reviewer for ESSLLI Student Session
Awards and Grants
2020 . RPA Human(e) AI seed funding. Project: Exploring Adaptation of Conversational Systems to Different Age Groups
2017 . STSM Grant by COST Action IC1307 for a 35-day research period at UvA, The
Netherlands2017 . COST Action IC1307 travel grant for iV&L Training School 2017, Athens, Greece2017 . EACL 2017 Studentship, Valencia, Spain2016 . COST Action IC1307 travel grant for VL'16 at ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany2016 . EUREGIO grant covering all expenses for ESSLLI 2016, Bolzano, Italy2014 . ERASMUS Program Scholarship for 6-month exchange at UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium