Sara Tonelli

Since 2013 I am the head of the Digital Humanities research group at FBK. I am currently involved in the H2020 ODEUROPA project, where I lead the work-package related to olfactory information extraction. I am also part of several other interesting European projects, for example PROTECTOR, STAND BY ME and SCAN2, more details here. I am currently involved in the HYBRIDS MSCA network, whose goal is to fight disinformation using AI and human-in-the-loop approaches. Between  January 2021 and December 2022 I was also the scientific coordinator of the KID ACTIONS European project, aimed at addressing cyberbullying among children and adolescents through interactive education and gamification.

I have a Phd in Language Sciences from Università Ca' Foscari, Venice. In 2020 I got the national habilitation as Associate Professor (seconda fascia) for the area `Information Systems' 09/H1. I am also a member of ELLIS, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, and an appointed Honorary Fellow (cultore della materia) in Computational Linguistics L-LIN/01 at Università di Pavia, Italy. I am currently serving as Liaison Representative of the ACL Special Interest Group on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SIG-HUM) and I am part of the board of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC).

I was involved in the past in several European projects: Pescado (FP7 - keyword extraction), Terence (FP7 - event-based text simplification), NewsReader (FP7 - event extraction and semantic role recognition), SIMPATICO (H2020 - text simplification in the administrative domain), HATEMETER (REC - social media monitoring for islamopohobia detection), CREEP (EitDIGITAL - Cyberbullying detection).

In 2022, I was area co-chair for "Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage" at LREC and area chair for the "Offensive and Non Inclusive Language Detection and Analysis" track at COLING. I am currently diversity and inclusion co-chair at EACL 2023.

Students' supervision:

Current Phd Students:

2022 - present: Nicolò Penzo (co-advised with Bruno Lepri and Marco Guerini) "Analysing the effect of counter-narratives on hateful conversations online", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2021 - present: Teresa Paccosi, "Extraction of Olfactory Information from Texts", Doctoral School in Cognitive Science, University of Trento

2020 - present: Camilla Casula "Multilingual abusive language detection", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2019 - present: Daniela Trotta (co-advised with Annibale Elia) "Multimodal political communication", Dept. of Linguistics, University of Salerno

 

Past Phd students:

2018 - 2022: Federico Bonetti, "Gamification for Linguistic Annotation", Doctoral School in Cognitive Science, University of Trento

2017 - 2022: Matteo Lorenzini (co-advised with Marco Rospocher) "Automatic quality improvement and content enrichment of digital cultural heritage data", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2016 - 2020: Lorenzo Lucchini (co-advised with Bruno Lepri), "Modeling and forecasting cultural dynamics with natural language processed data",  ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2013 - 2018: Stefano Menini, "Automatic Analysis of Agreement and Disagreement in the Political Domain", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2013 - 2018: Rachele Sprugnoli, "Event detection and classification for the Digital Humanities", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento

2012 - 2016: Paramita Mirza, "Extracting temporal and causal relations between events", ICT Doctoral School, University of Trento [arXiv]

Social media analysis and Hate speech detection: CREEP and Hatemeter projects, KID ACTIONS project, PROTECTOR project, PERCEPTIONS project.

Event and temporal/causal processing: Terence and NewsReader European projects, Rachele Sprugnoli's thesis, Paramita Mirza's thesis [link to software, poster, download CausalTimeBank]

Agreement, Disagreement and Argumentation Mining, especially in the political domain: collaboration with INRIA & University of Nice, Stefano Menini's thesis [link to data, link to datasets], collaboration with University of Mannheim (honorable mention at EMNLP 2017 for joint paper)

Digital Humanities, Historical Data Processing, Digital Cultural Heritage: ALCIDE project [link to demo], project on Epistolario De Gasperi and Edizione Nazionale Aldo Moro, Matteo Lorenzini's thesis work. Current ODEUROPA project.

Text Simplification: Terence and SIMPATICO European projects, MUSST syntactic simplifier [link to software], ERNESTA simplification tool, SIMPITIKI corpus for Italian Simplification [link to dataset]

FrameNet, Keyword Extraction and Terminology: my Phd thesis work [link to Italian FrameNet data], collaboration with Luciano Serafini to create a FrameNet-based resource for the Semantic Web [link to data], Keyphrase Digger extraction tool [link to demo and software].

 

1. Corazza, Michele; Menini, Stefano; Cabrio, Elena; Tonelli, Sara; Villata, Serena,
   A Multilingual Evaluation for Online Hate Speech Detection,
   in «ACM TRANSACTIONS ON INTERNET TECHNOLOGY»,
   vol. 20,
   n. 2,
   2020
   , pp. 1-
   22
2. Sprugnoli, Rachele; Tonelli, Sara,
   Novel Event Detection and Classification for Historical Texts,
   in «COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS»,
   vol. 45,
   n. 2,
   2019
   , pp. 229-
   265
3. Lucchini, Lorenzo; Tonelli, Sara; Lepri, Bruno,
   Following the footsteps of giants: modeling the mobility of historically notable individuals using Wikipedia,
   in «EPJ DATA SCIENCE»,
   vol. 8,
   n. 36,
   2019
4. Menini, S.; Cabrio, E.; Tonelli, S.; Villata, S.,
   Never Retreat, Never Retract: Argumentation Analysis for Political Speeches,
   Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18),
   2018
5. Menini, Stefano; Nanni, Federico; Simone Paolo Ponzetto, ; Tonelli, Sara,
   Topic-Based Agreement and Disagreement in US Electoral Manifestos,
   Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing,
   Association for Computational Linguistics,
   2017
   , pp. 2928-
   2934