Viviana Patti

Bio

Viviana Patti is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science of University of Turin, head of the PhD program in Computer Science, and member of the scientific committee of the Interdepartmental Centre for Logic, Language and Cognition since its foundation. She has been a member of the Guarantee Committee of the University of Turin. In 2021, she obtained the national scientific qualification for the role of full professor in Computer Science. She is vice-president of the board of directors of the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC), vice-president of the master’s degree program in Language Technologies and Digital Humanities and vice-coordinator of the inter-athenaeum second-level master HumanAIze, designed to integrate humanistic competences with those necessary to participate in the processes of technological innovation linked to the increasingly pervasive use of AI.

Her main research interests are in the research area of Artificial Intelligence from the very beginning. Currently, they are centered on Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Affective Computing, and in particular include sentiment analysis, emotion recognition and irony detection, with a focus on processing social media texts. She is currently involved in hate speech monitoring, with a focus on hatred against immigrants, populist rhetoric, automatic identification of misogyny and stereotypes, and support for the dissemination of gender-fair language, applying computational linguistics techniques in national and international projects, including “Contro l’Odio”, the Google-funded “Be Positive!” and “Sterheotypes” projects. He supervised and supervises a group of PhD students and postdocs on these topics.

She coordinated the European pilot project ‘EVALITA4ELG: Italian EVALITA Benchmark Linguistic Resources, NLP Services and Tools for the ELG platform’ funded by the European Language Grid H2020 project. Within the FAIR project, she coordinates the HARMONIA project (Harmony in Hybrid Decision-Making: Knowledge-enhanced Perspective-taking LLMs for Inclusive Decision-Making). She has always been active in the field of evaluation and benchmarking of language technologies as co-organiser of evaluation campaigns for Italian and other languages and is one of the organisers of CALAMITA, an AILC initiative specifically aimed at building a benchmark for testing the abilities of LLMs in Italian. She has coordinated several technology transfer projects in collaboration with companies, including the M.EMO.RAI project, which involved research groups from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin and the RAI ICT division in the development of a platform to monitor and analyse the emotions, conflicts, debates and passions of tv audiences on social media, using AI techniques.

She is currently involved in the POPULUS (Multilingual Perspective-Aware NLU) project in partnership with Amazon Alexa, in the coordination on the UniTO side of the DEA (Digital, Equity, Actions) project funded by Fondirigenti for the “development of innovative methods and tools to support companies in reducing the Gender Gap in STEM careers, and in a greater participation and managerial qualification of women in STEM fields”, and finally in the coordination of the FAIRLY project for the development of a tool to support writing in gender-fair language based on language technologies, funded as part of the UniTO 2024 participatory budget initiatives.

She is co-author of +150 papers published in international and national journals and conference proceedings and regularly serves as (senior) area chair in the scientific committees of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence conferences.