Research interests
Social Research Methodology:
Statistical Learning for Social Sciences
Text Mining & Opinion Analysis
Large Language Models
Authorship attribution
Topic modeling
Social Network Analysis
Stance Detection
Structural Equations Modeling
Sociology:
Social Media
Poverty and Social Exclusion
Internet Skills
Social Capital
Civil Culture
Computer skills:
Statistical packages: R, SAS, SPSS
Social Network Analysis software: R, Ucinet, Stocnet
Web survey software: LimeSurvey, Blaise
Affiliations:
Member of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS) 2020-2024
Associate Researcher to the Pa.S.T.I.S. research unit of the University of Padua
Member of the GIAT (Interdisciplinary Text Analysis Group) network
Member of text.it a discussion forum among those within the SIS Statistics & Data Science group who are interested in natural language processing
Member of the FINMORE thematic table (interdisciplinary group dedicated to financial research) 2020-2021
Competitions:
Stats Under the Stars (8-9th September 2015) - team “Antics of Statistics”: 4th place (final rank); 3rd place (best model rank).
Evalita2020 - Seventh Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (Online event, December 17th, 2020)– SardiStance task, team “TextWiller”: 2nd place (task B).
VaxxStance shared task at IberLEF 2021 (3rd Workshop on Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum, co-located with the SEPLN Conference 2021), team “WordUp!”: 1st place in every track (close textual, close contextual, open, and zero-shot) and every language (Spanish and Basque).
Awards:
Best poster award (ex-aequo) in the conference "Lorenzo Bernardi e la Statistica Sociale. Tra formazione, società e istituzioni".
Past research activities
National Projects:
2024 BIRD-UNIPD "Capturing Distinctiveness in Text Classification Tasks"
2023 PRIN "Reading the italian novel at a distance (1830-1930)"
2023 BIRD-UNIPD "On the extended paradigm of Artificial Intelligence"
2021 EU-COST Action "Distant Reading for a European Literacy History"
2011 EU-PACT (PAthways for Carbon Transitions)
2020 UNIMORE-FAR – Attrezzature 2020
2010-2011→ PRIN “Educational Resources, Discontinuities and Human Capital Reorganization”, PI: Prof. Silvio Scanagatta, University of Padua
2009-2010 → PRIN “Social capital and public benefits: proximity networks and life cycles of the family”, PI: Prof. Paola Di Nicola, University of Verona
2008 → Head of the Padua University survey “Professional outcomes of Ph.D's” (design, implementation, analysis and reporting)
Academic service
Reviewer:
• Social Indicators Research
• Statistical Methods & Applications
• Quality & Quantity
• Scientific Reports
• PLoS ONE
• Journal of Financial Management, Markets and Institutions
• Italian Journal of Sociology of Education
• Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia