Alessandro Lenci
Full professor (L-LIN/01)
Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura, e Linguistica
Università di Pisa
Director of the CoLing Lab (Computational Linguistics Laboratory):
http://colinglab.humnet.unipi.it
Webpage: https://people.unipi.it/alessandro_lenci/
Google Scholar: h-index 35, citations: 5580
Scopus: h-index: 14, citations 1144
ORCID: 0000-0001-5790-4308
EDUCATION
1999: PhD in Linguistics (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)
1991: Master degree in Philosophy (University of Pisa)
ACADEMIC CAREER
2020 – present: Full professor of linguistics (L/LIN-01) – University of Pisa
2011 – 2020: Associate professor of linguistics (L/LIN-01) – University of Pisa
2015 – 2017: Adjunct professor of computational linguistics at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
2002 – 2011: Researcher in linguistics (L/LIN-01) – University of Pisa
1999 – 2002: Research assistant in linguistics – University of Pisa
1996 – 1997: Acting professor of Italian philology (University of Helsinki)
RESEARCH GRANTS
2019 – present: PI of the project “Event Extraction for Fake News Identification”, funded by MIT, USA (MISTI Global Seed Funds with University of Pisa)
2018 – 2020: PI for the University of Pisa of the project “SEM il Chattadino”, funded by the Regione Toscana (POR FESR 2014 – 2020)
2017 – 2019: PI of the project “MUSE – MUltimodal Semantic Extraction, two-year project funded by Regione Toscana (POR FSE 2014-2020)
2017 – 2019: PI for the project “UBIMOL – UBIquitous Massive Open Learning” funded by the Regione Toscana (POR FESR 2014 – 2020).
24/02/2015 – 24/02/2016: National PI of the PRIN 2010/11 (20105B3HE8) “Word Combinations in Italian – Theoretical and descriptive analysis, computational models, lexicographic layout and creation of a dictionary”
2013 – 23/02/2015: PI of the research Unit of the University of Pisa of the PRIN 2010/11 (20105B3HE8)
14/11/2015 – 2018: PI of the project “Voci della Grande Guerra”, 2-year project funded with a grant of the Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Bando per il Centenario della Grande Guerra.
2013 – 2015: PI for the project “SEMPLICE – SEMantic instruments for PubLIc administrators and CitizEns”, funded by the Regione Toscana (POR CReO 2007 – 2013 LINEA DI INTERVENTO 1.5.a – 1.6 BANDO UNICO R&S ANNO 2012)
2010 – 2012: Vice-coordinator of the PRIN 2008 (2008CM9MY3_001) ” Il linguaggio spaziale nei non vedenti: analisi di dati e indagini neurolinguistiche”
AWARDS
2020: Test-of-Time Award by the Association for Computational Linguistics for the paper “Distributional Memory” with Marco Baroni, appeared in Computational Linguistics (2010)
2020: Best Paper Award at the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL)
EDITORIAL BOARDS
— Editorial Advisory Board of the series “Studies in Natural Language Processing” (Cambridge University Press)
– Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics
– Journal of Language Modelling
– Lingue e Linguaggio (Il Mulino)
ACADEMIC DUTIES
2020 – present: Member of the Evaluation Committee of the University of Pisa
2020 – present: Vice-coordinator of the PhD Program in Linguistic Studies and Foreign Literatures
of the University of Pisa
2017 – 2020: President of the bachelor and master degree in Digital Humanities, University of Pisa
2015 – 2017: Vice-coordinator of the PhD program in Philology, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Pisa
2015 – 2017: Vice-president of the bachelor and master degree in Digital Humanities, University of Pisa
2012 – 2015: Coordinator of the PhD Research Program in Linguistics at the University of Pisa
RESEARCH ABROAD
2020: Visiting researcher at the Evelina Fedorenko & Ted Gibson Labs, MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
2017: Visiting researcher at the Brain & Language Research Institute, Université Aix-Marseille
2012: Visiting researcher at Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, IMS – Universität Stuttgart, with a grant of the NetWords project
2008: Visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), University of California, Berkeley (Prof. Charles Fillmore)
2000: Visiting researcher at the Universty of Helsinki (Prof. Gabriel Sandu)
1998: Visiting researcher at the Brandeis University, USA (Prof. James Pustejovsky)
ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC EVENTS
– Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-VI), Workshop at Coling, 13 settembre 2020, Barcellona (insieme a Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni ed Enrico Santus)
– local organizer of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Florence, 2019
– Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing, Workshop at ACL, Melbourne, 2018
– SemEval 2018 – Task 10: Capturing Discriminative Attributes
– local organizer of Depling 2017, Pisa 18-20 September 2017
– Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, Workshop at ACL, Berlin, 2016
– Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, Workshop at EMNLP, Lisbon, 2015
– CLiC-it 2014, Prima Conferenza di Linguistica Computazionale Italiana, 9-10 December 2014, Pisa
– Chronos11 – 11th International Conference on Actionality, Tense, Aspect, Modality/Evidentiality, 16-18 June 2014, Pisa.
– Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, Workshop at EACL 2014, Gothenburg, 2014.
– Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Models of Language Meaning in Context, Dagstuhl, 11-15 November 2013 (funded by the Leibniz Association, Germany).
– International Conference on Semantic Representations in the Blind, 5-6 October 2012, Pisa.
– The Identification and Representation of Verb Features – Interdisciplinary Workshop on Verbs, 4-5 November 2010, Pisa.
– ESSLLI 2010 Workshop on Compositionality and Distributional Semantic Models, 16-20 August 2010, Copenhagen.
– International Conference on Space in Language, 8-9 October 2009.
– Rappresentare il significato delle parole: teorie linguistiche ed evidenza neuro-cognitiva, Workshop at the XLII Congresso della Società Linguistica Italiana, 25-27 November 2008, Pisa.
– ESSLLI 2008 Workshop on Distributional Semantics Bridging the gap between semantic theory and computational simulations, Workshop at ESSLLI, 4-9 August 2008, Hamburg.
– Contextual Information in Semantic Space Models: Beyond Words and Documents, Workshop at CONTEXT 07, Roskilde.
– OntoLex 2006 Ontologies and Lexical Resources, Workshop at the LREC 2006 Conference.
– OntoLex 2005 Ontologies and Lexical Resources, Workshop at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Jeju Island
– The 3rd Workshop on Asian Language Resources and International Standardization, 31 August 2002, Taipei.
– Workshop on Linguistic Knowledge Acquisition and Representation: Bootstrapping Annotated Language Data, 1 June 2002, Las Palmas.
– Workshop on Semantic Knowledge Acquisition and Categorisation, at the 13th ESSLLI, 13-17 August 2001, Helsinki.
– Second Workshop on Lexical Semantics Systems, 6-7 April 1998, Pisa
– area co-chair COLING 2020 for “CL/NLP and Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics”
– area co-chair at *SEM 2017 (The Sixth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics) for “Distributional Semantics
– area co-chair at COLING 2014 (25th Conference on Computational Linguistics) for “Semantic Processing, Distributional Semantics and Compositional Semantics
– area co-chair a EMNLP 2013 (Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) for “Computational Models of Human Language Acquisition and Processing”
– area co-chair at the IJCNLP 2004 (1stInternational Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2004) for “Lexicon, Ontologies and Language Resources”
– workshop co-chair of ACL 2003 (41st Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics), Sapporo.
INVITED TALKS
– “The meaning of word embeddings: A semantic investigation”, Université de Genève – May 12th, 2020
– “How do distributional vectors represent meaning? Encoding and decoding semantic features from word embeddings”, keynote speaker al CCiL 2019 Annual Workshop, University of Barcelona
– “Leveraging Distributional Data to Project Embodied Semantic Dimensions”, Giornata di linguistica sperimentale e computazionale, University of Padova, 23 February 2018.
– “Distributional Semantics and Vector Codes for Concepts and their Combinations”, Collège de France, 29 January 2018.
– “What distributional semantics can (and cannot) tell us about meaning”, keynote speaker at AIC 2017, 5th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, Larnaca, 1-3 November 2017.
– “Dynamic Compositional Representations in Distributional Semantics”, invited talk at the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 8 June 2017
– “Distributional Semantics and Sentence Comprehension: The Case of Logical Metonymy”, invited talk at IRIT, University of Tolouse, Tolouse, 3 March 2017
– “Distributional Semantics and Dynamic Semantic Representations”, invited talk at IMS, University of Stuttgart, 19 January 2017
– “The Emotions of Abstract Words: A Distributional Semantic Analysis”, keynote speaker at the Abstract Concepts International Symposium, Amsterdam, 18 November 2016
– “Going Dynamic” in Distributional Semantics”, invited talk at the ESSLLI Workshop Referential Semantics one Step Further, ESSLLI 2017, Bolzano, 23 August 2016
– “Distributional Models of Sentence Comprehension”, invited talk at the DSALT Workshop Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory, ESSLLI 2017, Bolzano, 17 August 2016
– “La linguistica nell’era dei Big Data”, keynote speaker at Orizzonti della Linguistica, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 30 maggio 2016
– “Semantic relations in distributional semantics”, invited talk at the Lund University, Lund, 11 March 2015
– “Will Distributional Semantics Ever Become Semantic?”, invited plenary talk at the 7th Conference on Global WordNet, Tartu (Estonia), 25-29 January 2014.
– “Semantic Relations in Distributional Semantics. The case of hypernymy”, invited seminar at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, IMS – Universität Stuttgart, 18 June 2012.
– “Unseen features Collecting semantic data from congenital blind subjects”, invited plenary talk at the Workshop on Computational Models of Language Acquisition and Loss, EACL 2012, Avignone, Aprile 24, 2012.
– “Representing meaning with distributional features: the Distributional Memory framework”, invited plenary talk at the Workshop on Concepts and Feature Spaces, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, 16-17 June 2011.
– “Carving Italian Verb Classes from Corpora”, invited plenary talk at the International Conference on Word Classes, Università di Roma Tre, Roma, 24-26 March 2010.
– “Distributional Memory. A Generalized Framework for Corpus-based Semantics” invited talk at the CNRS CLLE-ERSS, Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, Toulouse, 11 February 2010.
INTERNATIONAL LECTURES
– course on “La rivoluzione digitale in linguistica”, Scuola Estiva di Glottologia e Linguistica, Lignano Sabbiadoro – Udine, 4-7 September 2017
– course on “Distributional Semantics” at the EXCITEMENT Summer School (University of Heidelberg) (2-6 September 2013)
– course on “Distributional Semantics” at the 1st NetWords Summer School (Dubrovnik, 2-6 July 2012)
– course on “Distributional Semantic Models – Theory and Empirical Results” at the 21st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), Bordeaux, 26-31 July 2009
PHD SUPERVISION
— He has supervised more than 25 PhD theses at the University of Pisa
– He has been called as external examiner of PhD theses at the University of Copenhagen, Cambridge University, Pompeu Fabra University (Barcellona), University of Toulouse, University of Stuttgart
MEMBERSHIPS IN SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS
– member of the Società Italiana di Glottologia (SIG)
– founder, member, and secretary of the Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale (AILC)
– member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
MAIN SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS
– distributional semantics
– lexical semantics
– aspect and event types
– computational linguistics and natural language processing
– sentiment analysis and emotion detection
– psycholinguistics and cognitive science
SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY (1992 to PRESENT)
201 publications, including:
– 2 books
– 6 edited books
– 46 articles in peer-reviewed national and international journals
– 37 chapters in edited books
– 100 articles in international conference proceedings
Currently under contract with Cambridge University Press for the volume “Distributional Semantics”, to be published in the series “Studies in Natural Language Processing”, co-authored with Magnus Sahlgren.