Alessandra Teresa Cignarella

I am currently a Post-doc Researcher in the project "STERHEOTYPES" at the Computer Science Department at the Università degli Studi di Torino. The aim is to promote awareness of the psychological processes emerging from racial hoaxes, in particular in new digital generations, by fruitfully combining methodological approaches coming from psychology and computational linguistics. Scholars in three Mediterranean European countries are involved: France, Italy and Spain. In particular, the computational linguistics teams will examine stereotypes and prejudices from a cross-cultural perspective by analyzing multilingual corpora related to racial hoaxes in different countries, collected from online newspapers and social media, and from students interacting in controlled settings with a tailored app created for the project.

I obtained my PhD in cotutelle between the Content-Centered Computing group inside the Computer Science Department at the Università degli Studi di Torino (supervision of Cristina Bosco) and inside the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center at the Universitat Politècnica de València (co-supervision of Paolo Rosso).

I am particularly interested in the research areas of Natural Language Processing and Theoretical Linguistics. During my PhD I mainly focused on the topics of irony and stance detection in social media. In particular, assessing the impact of dependency-based syntactic features (exploiting the Universal Dependencies format) in such tasks.