Graduated, and starting a PhD at Sapienza NLP!

I’m happy to share that I’ll be starting a PhD in Engineering in Computer Science at Sapienza Università di Roma this fall!

This summer I completed my Master’s degree in Classical Philology at the University of Foggia, with a thesis on computational methods for Latin lexical semantics. Its full title is Metodi computazionali e casi studio per l’analisi semantica del Latino con una proposta didattica (Computational methods and case studies for the semantic analysis of Latin, with a teaching proposal), and it was supervised by Prof. Tiziana Ragno and co-supervised by Prof. Anna Riccio, whom I thank for their guidance. It closes five years in Foggia, between my BA in Digital Humanities, this MA and my work as a research assistant at the university since 2022.

In Rome, I’m excited to start working with the Sapienza NLP team, led by Roberto Navigli, on semantically-empowered Small Language Models. My focus will be on Word Sense Disambiguation and Semantic Role Labeling: the plan is to build linguistically grounded, low-parameter language models for multilingual lexical and predicate-argument semantics, and to study multilingual transfer in these models, evaluating them on tasks like machine translation and diachronic semantic change.

See you in Rome 🍝