Event Date: Thursday, 8 May, 2025 Location: 11:00-13:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Marco Mazzone (University of Catania) Title: Inferenze pragmatiche e ragionamento associativo, al tempo dei LLMs Abstract: In una serie di lavori (ampiamente confluiti in Mazzone 2018, ma vedi anche Mazzone 2021), ho delineato un resoconto inferenziale della comprensione pragmatica, basato…
The Delos AI team – Serena Auriemma, Ludovica Cerini, and Martina Miliani – of the Coling Lab has won the third price at the Start Cup by Regione Toscana. Delos AI will now participate at the start-up national competition. More information
Continue Reading [Press] The Delos AI Team of the Coling Lab awarded at the Start Cup
The Delos AI team – Serena Auriemma, Ludovica Cerini, and Martina Miliani – of the Coling Lab has won the Contamination Lab Start-up Award at the University of Pisa. Congratulations at the Delos AI team for this big success!
Event Date: Thursday, 4 July, 2024 Location: 11:00-13:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Cristiano Chesi (IUSS, Pavia) Title: Generative linguistics in the era of very Large Language Models Abstract: A significant debate has emerged in response to a paper written by Steven Piantadosi (Piantadosi, 2023, lingbuzz/007180) within the (generative) linguistics community. In…
Event Date: Tuesday, 11 June, 2024 Location: 10:00-12:00, Sala delle Colonne, Pal. Venera (I piano) Speaker: Prof. Roberto Zamparelli (University of Trento) Title: Un immagine e mille parole. Riflessioni sulla generazione di testo e immagini Abstract: La ricerca recente sull’intelligenza artificiale che si occupa di linguaggio e di visione contiene sistemi che forniscono descrizioni testuali di…
On March 26th, official opening of the GoodAI Lab a multidisciplinary laboratory for the study, promotion and validation of trustworthy, transparent, robust, safe and ethical AI Systems. CoLing Lab is a founder member of the GoodAi Lab. For more information, see: https://www.unipi.it/index.php/news/item/27780-inaugurato-il-laboratorio-good-ai-per-una-intelligenza-artificiale-buona
Event Date: Friday, 10 November, 2023 Location: 11:00-13:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Arthur Glenberg (Arizona State University) Title: Language comprehension requires embodied processing Abstract: In the first part of this talk, I discuss whether Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, understand language the way humans do. The results of empirical work show…
Event Date: Wednesday, 18 October, 2023 Location: 09:00-11:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Ryan Nefdt (University of Cape Town) Title: Natural Languages and Real Patterns: Grammars and Language Models Abstract: In this talk, I present my own view of the nature of natural language and linguistics (Nefdt 2023). Specifically, I develop an…
Event Date: Thursday, 15 December, 2022 Location: 15:00-16:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Gosse Minnema (University of Groningen) Title: Perspective Matters: Event Framing in Language and Society Abstract: Different linguistic expressions can conceptualize the same event from different viewpoints by emphasizing certain participants over others. In my presentation, I will try to show that…
Event Date: Wednesday, 14 September, 2022 Location: 12:00-13:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Florent Perek (University of Birmingham) Title: Direct object definiteness and verb meaning: A corpus-based investigation Abstract: Research on English and other languages typically makes two basic assumptions about the grammar of verbs and nouns. First, verbs are taken to determine…
Event Date: Wednesday, 14 September, 2022 Location: 11:00-12:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera (II piano) Speaker: Prof. Philippe Blache (CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université) Title: Compositionality, unification and the good-enough perspective Abstract: Many different works address the question of knowing whether language processing is compositional or not. As Dowty underlines, asking this question comes to “express skepticism about…
Event Date: Monday, 11 July, 2022 Location: 11:00-13:00, Online Speaker: Dr. Lucia Busso & Prof. Tim Grant (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics) Title: The FOrensic Linguistic Databank: the challenge of open science in Forensic Linguistics Abstract: The talk presents an innovative online resource for sharing and accessing forensic linguistics data, the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD),…
Continue Reading [Seminar] Dr. Lucia Busso & Prof. Tim Grant
Event Date: Friday, 8 April, 2022 Location: 11:00-13:00, Aula Magna, Pal. Matteucci Speaker: Prof. Giosuè Baggio (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Title: Composition and compositionality in a parallel architecture for language processing Abstract: Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas…
The paper “Did the Cat Drink the Coffee? Challenging Transformers with Generalized Event Knowledge“ by Paolo Pedinotti, Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Alessandro Lenci, and Philippe Blache has received the Best Paper Award at *SEM – The 10th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, August 5 – 6, 2021. More details on UNIPINEWS.
Event Date: Wednesday, 10 March, 2021 (15:00) Location: Online Speaker: Prof. Ekaterina Shutova (University of Amsterdam) Title: Modelling the interplay of metaphor and emotion Abstract: Besides making our thoughts more vivid and filling our communication with richer imagery, metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in our cognition, helping us to organise and project knowledge. For…
The paper “Comparing Probabilistic, Distributional and Transformer-Based Models on Logical Metonymy Interpretation“ by Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci, Philippe Blache, and Chu-Ren Huang has received the Best Paper Award at the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL), December 4 – 7, 2020. More deatails on UNIPINEWS
The system UNIPI-NLE developed by Alessandro Bondielli and Lucia Passaro has achieved the second top score at the CLEF2020 Fact Checking Challenge: CheckThat! – Enabling Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media. The system is the result of a collaboration between CoLing Lab and the Department of Computer Engineering (Prof. Francesco Marcelloni). More…
Continue Reading CoLing Lab Success at CLEF 2020 Fact Cheking Challenge
Dank Memes is one of the tasks selected for the 7th edition of EVALITA, the contest of Natural Language Processing and Speech for Italian. The final workshop of the evaluation campaign will be held on December 3rd in Bologna, as a co-located event of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics – CLiC-it 2020 (Nov 30th…
Continue Reading CoLing Lab @ Evalita2020: Meme Analysis Task
Event Date: Tuesday, 8 October, 2019 Location: 12:00-14:00, Sala Colonne, Pal. Venera Speaker: Prof. Sabine Schulte im Walde (IMS, University of Stuttgart) Title: Distributional Semantic Spaces and Classification Models of Abstractness and Figurative Language Abstract: Distributional models assume that the contexts of a linguistic unit (such as a word, a multi-word expression, a phrase, a…
Event Date: Thursday, 3 October, 2019 Location: 10:00-12:00, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera Speaker: Jane Lutken (John Hopkins University, USA) Title: An introduction to Optimality Theory: survival of the fit enough Abstract: Language variation has been attributed to differences in parameter settings (Chomsky, 1981). Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004) builds upon this idea, suggesting…
Event Date: Tuesday, 2 July, 2019 Location: 11:30-13:30, Sala Colonne, Pal. Venera Speaker: Prof. Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton) Title: With a little help from NLP: My Language Technology applications with impact on society Abstract: The talk will present three original methodologies developed by the speaker, underpinning implemented Language Technology tools which are already having…
Event Date: Thursday, 13 June, 2019 Location: 11-13, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera Speaker: Prof. James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University) Title: The Semantics of Affordances Abstract: In this talk, I discuss the requirements on a semantics for situated and grounded meaning. I argue that the creation and updating of common ground in discourse relies on a sophisticated…
Event Date: Wednesday, 22 May, 2019 Location: 11-13, Sala Colonne, Pal. Venera Speaker: Dr. Rachel Ryskin (MIT) Title: Lifelong learning of linguistic representations Abstract: Like much of the perceptual input that humans experience, language is highly variable. Two speakers may produce the same phoneme with different acoustics, and a sentence can have multiple syntactic parses.…
Event Date: Tuesday, 21 May, 2019 Location: 10-12, Sala Riunioni, Pal. Venera Speaker: Dr. Idan Blank (MIT & UCLA) Title: When we “know the meaning” of a word, what kind of knowledge do we have? Abstract: Understanding words appears to require both linguistic knowledge (stored form-meaning pairings and ways to combine them) and world knowledge (object properties, event structure, etc.).…
Alessandro Lenci (CoLing Lab) is one of the local organizers of ACL 2019 in Florence, together with Bernardo Magnini (FBK – Trento) and Simonetta Montemagni (ILC-CNR)
Event Date: Monday, 2 July, 2018 Location: 10-12 and 14-16, Room B3 Palazzo Boilleau Speaker: Prof. Sebastian Padó (IMS, University of Stuttgart) Title: Distributional Analysis of Entities Abstract: Distributional semantics has achieved substantial success in using corpus evidence as the basis for modeling word meaning, disambiguation in context, and semantic relations between words. However, most…
Event Date: Wednesday, 27 June, 2018, 3 p.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Luca Onnis (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) Title: Incremental statistical learning of language Abstract: A tacit assumption in distributional approaches to learning is that learners collect global statistics across the entire set of stimuli…
Event Date: Wednesday, 13 June, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE, CNRS, Paris) Title: Multilingual Dependency Parsing for Low-Resource Languages Abstract: I will present a method for dependency parsing using multilingual word embeddings. I will detail two main contributions. First, we…
Event Date: Wednesday, 16 May, 2018, 5:30 p.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Ton Dijkstra (Radboud University Nijmegen) Title: Multilink: A computational model for bilingual word recognition and word translation Abstract: The computational BIA+ model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002) has provided a useful account for bilingual…
Event Date: Thursday, 31 May, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Dr. Francesca Carota (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) Title: Neurocognitive representations of lexical complexity Abstract: Morphological derivation offers a cross-linguistically relevant strategy to generate novel lexical items based on existing lexical material. How…
Event Date: Monday, 30 May, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Gabriella Vigliocco (UCL) Title: Language as a multimodal Phenomenon Abstract: Despite the fact that language typically unfolds in face-to-face contexts in which speech is accompanied with facial and hand movements, the study of language…
Event Date: Thursday, 5 April, 2018, 11.30 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Eleonora Borelli & Cristina Cacciari (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Title: La semantica del dolore: dalla struttura psicolinguistica ed emozionale ai correlati comportamentali e neurali Abstract: Il linguaggio è lo strumento principale…
Continue Reading [Seminar] Prof. Eleonora Borelli & Cristina Cacciari
CoLing Lab, as a member of the PoliCom Research Group, uses NLP to analyse the posts on Facebook and Twittwer by the major political leaders and parties during the 2018 Italian Political Election Campaign. In particular, the Coling Lab team – formed by Alessandro Lenci, Lucia Passaro, Alessandro Bondielli, and Giulia Giorgi – carries out…
Continue Reading CoLing Lab and Italian 2018 Political Elections
Event Date: Thursday, 17 May, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex) Title: Identifying Idiomatic Language with Distributional Semantic Models Abstract: Precise natural language understanding requires adequate treatments both of single words and of larger units. However, expressions like compound nouns…
Event Date: Thursday, 26 April, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Denis Paperno (Lorraine Lab of Computer Science and its Applications, CNRS) Title: Predictability in the semantic space: towards a distributional characterization of the inflection-derivation distinction Abstract: The literature is divided on the relationship…
Event Date: Thursday, 1 March, 2018, 11 a.m. Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room] Speaker: Prof. Raffaella Bernardi (University of Trento) Title: Grounded Textual Entailment Abstract: A long standing challenge for computational semanticists has been to build models able to capture the semantic relations holding between sentences. This task…
Ideal words: how to refer like a god
Semantic composition with and without reference
Metaphorical similarity in visual metaphors and linguistic metaphors: A distributional approach
Acquiring Language through Interaction
Combining Broad-coverage Compositional Semantics with Distributional Approaches
One shall know a word by the linguistic and perceptual company it keeps
Adaptive Natural Language Processing with Graph-based Distributional Semantics
Two of our papers received the Distinguished Young Paper Award at CLiC-it 2016
Continue Reading CoLing Lab wins two Distinguished Young Paper Awards @ CLiC-it 2016
Four of our papers have been accepted at two COLING 2016 Workshops
Come parla Renzi: 4 anni analizzati da un algoritmo
Continue Reading CoLing Lab analyzes the language of Matteo Renzi on Facebook
Four of our papers have been accepted at CLiC-it 2016 and EVALITA 2016
What You Need to Know about Chinese for Chinese Language Processing
Processing and Politics: Experimental and Corpus-based Research on Conceptual Metaphors
Analysing Authors
Five papers co-authored by members of the CoLing Lab have been accepted at LREC 2016
Modelling constructional change with distributional semantics
The fat lady hasn’t sung yet: A multi-methodological investigation of idiomatic variation
Frequency and predictability of multi-word expressions in L1 and L2: Evidence from eye movements and ERPs
The Gavagai Living Lexicon
Figurative language plays an important role in evoking emotion: Neuroscientific evidence
Emotional valence and arousal affect written word recognition in an interactive way: Behavioural and neurophysiological evidence
Generalization patterns in a probabilistic model of argument structure acquisition
Natural Language Processing for dealing with emotions, persuasion and creativity
Decomposing fMRI sentences into words, then words into embodied neural features, then reassembling the pieces to predict new words within sentences
Il Tirreno has published an article reporting the results of a research carried out in collaboration with the CoLing Lab
The SEMPLICE Project received the “Impresa + Innovazione + Lavoro” Award from the Regional Council of Tuscany
The first Italian Computational Linguistics Conference will take place in Pisa from 9-10 December 2014 and will be co-located with AI*IA 2014 and Evalita 2014
Continue Reading CoLing Lab is local organizer of CLiC-it 2014
Press clippings about our “Guarda come Parlano” demo
Press clippings about the SEMPLICE project































































