Hi, I'm Alessandra! I work as a postdoctoral fellow in the field of Natural Language Processing as a member of the Language and Translation Technology Team (LT3) at Ghent University. My current research project is "RAINBOW - Researching Stereotypes towards LGBTQIA+ Community Members with Multilingual Natural Language Processing", funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (2024-2026). I also co-founded aequa-tech (2023), an NLP startup based in Turin, with a great sensitivity concerning the issue of digital disparity. We aim at creating NLP tools within the reach of everyone. Right now we're focusing on the issue of fake news and disinformation. Previously (2021-2023), I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin within the European project STERHEOTYPES which aimed at understanding the social and psychological processes emerging from Racial Hoaxes in digital communications across three border Mediterranean European countries (Italy, Spain and France). Within the project we integrated different methodological approaches coming from social psychology and computational linguistics. In 2021, I obtained my PhD in Computer Science (NLP), within the International Doctorate between the University of Turin and the Universitat Politècnica de València. The title of my PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Cristina Bosco (University of Turin, Italy) and Prof. Paolo Rosso (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) is "Dependency Syntax in the Automatic Detection of Irony and Stance".
