Our paper ‘Tracking the Evolution of Written Language Competence in L2 Spanish Learners’ (with Sam Davidson, Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta, Kenji Sagae, Claudia Helena Sanchez-Gutierrez and Giulia Venturi) has been accepted at BEA-2020! In this paper we presented an NLP-based approach for tracking the evolution of written language competence in L2 Spanish learners using a wide range of linguistic features automatically extracted from students’ written productions. Beyond reporting classification results for different scenarios, we explored the connection between the most predictive features and the teaching curriculum, finding that our set of linguistic features often reflects the explicit instruction that students receive during each course.

Our paper ‘Contextual and Non-Contextual Word Embeddings: an in-depth Linguistic Investigation’ (with Felice Dell’Orletta) has been accepted at RepL4NLP-2020! In this paper we performed an in-depth linguistic analysis aimed at understanding the implicit knowledge encoded in a contextual and a contextual-independent Neural Language Model (NLM). In particular: we evaluated the best method for obtaining sentence-level representations out of single-word embeddings; we compared the results obtained by the two NLMs according to the different combining methods; we studied whether the contextualized model is able to encode sentence-level properties within its single word representations.

I am happy to announce that I will be co-organizing two shared tasks at EVALITA 2020, the evaluation campaign of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian, that will be held as a co-located event of the 7th Conference on Computational Linguistics - CLiC-it 2020 (Bologna, Nov 30th - Dec 3rd 2020). For more information please visit the shared tasks web pages: PRELEARN: Prerequisite RElation LEARNing ATE_ABSITA: Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

I am glad to announce the first PhD Giveback Event, which I organized together with Irene Sucameli and prof. Ferragina. It will be a great half-day event, during which former PhD students of our Department who now works for prestigious companies, will present themselves to the current PhD and MA students, talking about their post-doc experience as well as their current research activities within the respective companies. For more information please visit the website.