Rossella Varvara, PhD

I am currently a Research Fellow at the University of Turin, Department of Computer Science, Italy, where I work on evaluating alignment between humans and AI on linguistic tasks. I am also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pavia, the University of Milano-Bicocca, and the University of Florence, teaching a variety of topics ranging from introductory courses in Linguistics to advanced courses in Computational Linguistics.

My research interests range between morphology, lexical semantics, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics.

Updated academic CV

CV_ita_30marzo2025.pdf

Upcoming activities and events

I am honored to have been invited to give a talk at the upcoming JeNom workshop, hosted by the University of Graz, Austria, on July 3-4, 2025. I would like to thank the organizers for the opportunity to present on one of my favorite topics: nominalizations. See you in Graz!
Together with Richard Huyghe and Justine Salvadori, I am currently serving as a guest editor for a special issue of the journal Morphology titled "Semantic Transparency in Word Formation". Updates will be published here.
I am excited to serve as a member of the Program Committee for the Eleventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2025), which will take place in Cagliari from September 24-26, 2025. The paper submission deadline is June 6, 2025. For more information, please visit the conference website.
I had the privilege of serving as an Area Chair for the Language Resources and Evaluation track at the 2025 Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025), which was held in January 19-24, 2025. We received many interesting submissions, and thanks to the hard work of an impressive group of reviewers, we developed an exciting program. The conference proceedings are available here.
August 2024: together with Richard Huyghe and Justine Salvadori, I have organized a workshop at the 2024 SLE conference in Helsinki. The workshop was titled "The semantic transparency of morphologically complex words". You can find here the program of the workshop and the book of abstract.
August 2024: I have attended the IMM in Wien, presenting a work in collaboration with Richard Huyghe entitled "The linguistic factors of semantic transparency: Evidence from verb-to-noun derivation in French". Program and abstract available here: https://www.wu.ac.at/bizcomm/events/imm21/
September 2024: I have attended the Biennial of Czech Linguistics 2024 (https://bcl2024.ff.cuni.cz/en/home/). Together with Justine Salvadori and Richard Huyghe, we have presented two papers: "Creating and exploiting a lexical database of deverbal nouns in French" (during the workshop Data-based research in word formation) and "The semantics of conversion vs. affixation: Insights from nominalizations in French" (in the workshop Conversion/Zero-derivation: Aspects of the theory)