Author: Lia Draetta

Alan Ramponi will talk about one of his projects entitled “NLP meets non-standard languages: Opportunities and ethical responsibilities”.

Abstract

After many years of research focused primarily on standardized languages, the natural language processing (NLP) community has recently begun to include “non-standard” language varieties in its repertoire. This opens new opportunities for research, but it also presents unprecedented challenges and calls for greater ethical responsibilities. In this seminar, I will present recent work in NLP for non-standard languages with a focus on language varieties of Italy, highlighting i) the importance of accounting for linguistic variation and how to explore it, ii) the problematic assumption of considering all language varieties as the same in terms of language functions and technological needs, and iii) the need to actively engage with speech communities when dealing with endangered languages to co-design locally-meaningful artifacts that meet their needs and represent their language varieties.

Bio

Alan Ramponi is a senior researcher in natural language processing (NLP) at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy, where he is part of the Digital Humanities research group. His research focuses on language variation across many dimensions (e.g., non-standard varieties and dialects, domains, registers, social factors). He is interested in how NLP can contribute to the study of language variation, and how accounting for language variation can contribute to more robust, fair, and inclusive NLP. Web page: https://alanramponi.github.io/

When:  28/03/2025, h 11.00

Where: Aula 3.06 Thin Client (terzo piano) – Via Sant’Ottavio ,54

Beatrice Savoldi will present one of her recent work
entitle “Hi Guys or Hi folks? Navigating Gender Bias and Inclusive Language in Translation Technologies”.

Abstract

Societal gender asymmetries and inequalities can be embedded in our communication practices and perpetuated in language technologies, including Machine Translation (MT) systems used as scale. In this presentation, we will delve into the current landscape of MT and gender bias, as well as current proposals towards more inclusive language. 

By focusing on English-Italian as an exemplar language pair, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities — both theoretical, technical but also linguistic —  in fostering a more equitable automatic translation. 

When: 14/03/2025 11.00

Where: Aula 3.06 Thin Client (terzo piano) – Via Sant’Ottavio 54

Horacio Jarquin will present one of his projects
entitle “GAttention: Gated Attention for the Detection of Abusive Language”.

Abstract

Abusive language online creates toxic environments and exacerbates social tensions, underscoring the need for robust NLP models to interpret nuanced linguistic cues. This research introduces GAttention, a novel Gated Attention mechanism that combines the strengths of Contextual attention and Self-attention mechanisms to address the limitations of existing attention models within the text classification task. GAttention capitalizes on local and global query vectors by integrating the internal relationships within a sequence (Self-attention) and the global relationships among distinct sequences (Contextual attention). This combination allows for a more nuanced understanding and processing of sequence elements, which is particularly beneficial in context-sensitive text classification tasks such as the case of abusive language detection. By applying this mechanism to transformer-based encoder models, we showcase how it enhances the model’s ability to discern subtle nuances and contextual clues essential for identifying abusive language, a challenging and increasingly relevant task within NLP.

When: 21/03/2025 11.30

Where: Sala Riunioni (first floor)

Adriana Pagano will present one of her international projects
entitle “Bridging views on the concepts of ‘multilingual’, ‘cross-lingual’ and ‘translingual’ in Language Technology”.

Abstract

The presentation will introduce the interdisciplinary research network UniDive (Universality, Diversity, and Idiosyncrasy in Language Technology), a COST Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Adriana will focus on one of the tasks she is currently leading within UniDive’s Working Group 3 – Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Language Technology.

When: 17/01/2025 11.30

Where: Sala Conferenze (3rd floor)

Marco Madeddu is a PhD student at the beginning of her 1st year, and he will talk about one of his latest works called “Exploring YouTube Comments Reacting to Femicide News in Italian”

Abstract

In recent years, the Gender Based Violence (GBV) has become an important issue in modern society and a central topic in different research areas due to its alarming spread.
Several Natural Language Processing (NLP) studies, concerning Hate Speech directed against women, have focused on misogynistic behaviours, slurs or incel communities.
The main contribution of our work is the creation of the first dataset on social media comments to GBV, in particular to a femicide event.
Our dataset, named GBV-Maltesi, contains 2,934 YouTube comments annotated following a new schema that we developed in order to study GBV and misogyny with an intersectional approach.
During the experimental phase, we trained models on different corpora for binary misogyny detection and found that datasets that mostly include explicit expressions of misogyny are an easier challenge, compared to more implicit forms of misogyny contained in GBV-Maltesi.

When: 13/12/2024 11.30

Where: Sala Conferenze (3rd floor)