Intro

Ciao a tutti! I am a PhD Candidate in the Natural Language Processing group of the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Universiteit Utrecht, under the supervision of Prof. Kees van Deemter.

I work in the field of Natural Language Generation from meaning representation. In particular, I am trying to make artificial intelligence more self-explainable and easily accessible to society by clarifying the meaning of logical formulae.
I conduct research within the framework of the Interactive Natural Language Technology for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (NL4XAI) project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant.

For more information on my research, check out my work, whereas, if you would like to know more about me...

About

Ever since I was a little boy, I've always liked languages and been attracted by technology. I started my university journey with a BA in oriental languages. These studies let me widen my perspective over the human faculty of language, and that's when my love for languages deepened. I concluded my BA with a dissertation in historical linguistics talking about the evolution of Mandarin lexicon throughout its history.

After graduating, I had the opportunity to join Samsung to work in the localization project of the Bixby vocal assistant for Italian: I grabbed it in no time! It was a golden opportunity to explore a field that I had no idea existed. As soon as I started, I just couldn't get enough. I understood that computational linguistics was the right path for me to follow.

I yearned to learn more about the interactions that natural languages and computers can have. This brought me to start an MSc in NLP. During these studies, we developed GECko+, a writing assistant tool, for which we got a paper published. I also had the chance to work as a researcher at ATILF and Inria labs. In my MSc thesis, I created an intelligent tutoring system that organizes the concepts to master in a language acquisition setting.

This whole journey brought me to fall in love with research. As you might have read somewhere else already, I'm now a PhD researcher in Utrecht in the NL4XAI project framework. I'm working on automatically generating optimally intelligible text for humans, starting from obscure semantic formulae.

When I'm not teaching computers how to speak, I love doing sports and traveling. Discovering the marvelous things the planet we live on can offer us fuels my life. I'm a curious person, always eager to learn new things, and ready to accept new challenges to prove myself and improve as a human being.