Elisa Bassignana

Elisa Bassignana

Postdoctoral researcher in NLP

About Me

Hi, I'm Elisa!

I work in the field of Natural Language Processing as a member of the NLP north research unit at the IT University of Copenhagen and as an affiliated member of the Pioneer Center for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark. My research lays at the intersection between NLP and Computational Social Science. Specifically, I'm interested in analyzing social phenomena through the lens of language, by using NLP technologies. Currently, I just started my 3-year postdoc and I'm still defining the exact direction of my project. I work under the mentorship of Dr. Rob van der Goot (ITU) and Prof. Dr. Dirk Hovy (MilaNLP, Bocconi University).

Previously, I completed my PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen and as an affiliated member of the MaiNLP research lab at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) in Munich (LMU) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank and Dr. Rob van der Goot. The focus of my PhD project was developing computation systems for Information Extraction with strong abilities to generalize over unseen data sources and label spaces. Specifically, I worked on cross-domain Relation Extraction. Before that, I worked in the field of computational social science (hate speech and personality detection).

Recent Publications

Cross-domain Relation Extraction

Elisa Bassignana
PhD thesis, IT University of Copenhagen

Thesis Slides

Dissecting Biases in Relation Extraction: A Cross-Dataset Analysis on People’s Gender and Origin

Marco Antonio Stranisci*, Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot*, Elisa Bassignana*, Roberto Navigli
In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP 2024)
(*): equal contribution

Paper Poster

Can Humans Identify Domains?

Maria Barrett*, Max Müller-Eberstein*, Elisa Bassignana*, Amalie Brogaard Pauli*, Mike Zhang*, Rob van der Goot*
In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
(*): equal contribution

Paper Code Poster Video

All publications

Grants and Awards

Villum International Postdoc Grant - 2.4M DKK (2023)

Three year postdoc at the IT University of Copenhagen, including a two years stay at Bocconi University (Italy).

Press release        ITU interview

Outstanding Paper Award - 2,000 USD (2022)

Outstanding paper award at the Machine Learning Evaluation Standards workshop at ICLR.

Paper

Pietro Torasso Award - 1,500 EUR (2020)

Best M.Sc. thesis in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Turin defended in 2020.

Award announcement

Erasmus+ Scholarship - 2,300 EUR (2020)

Sole recipient for an exchange semester at the University of Groningen.

Teaching

Introduction to Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning - Lecturer

IT University of Copenhagen (2023, 2022)

Vertiefung der Grundlagen der Computerlinguistik - Guest lecturer

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2023, 2022)

Seminars in Data Science - Lecturer and examiner

IT University of Copenhagen (2022)

Introduction to Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning - Lecturer and senior TA

IT University of Copenhagen (2021)