Elisa Bassignana

Elisa Bassignana

Postdoctoral researcher in NLP

About Me

Hi, I'm Elisa!

My research lies at the intersection between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science (CSS). I analyze social phenomena through the lens of language, with the goal to reduce inequalities. For example, I'm interested in studying the impact of AI in widening the socioeconomic gap across social strata and how we can develop fairer language technologies. I'm affiliated with the NLP north research unit at the IT University of Copenhagen and with the Pioneer Center for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark. Currently, I'm on a long-term visit (2 year) at MilaNLP (Bocconi University) working with Prof. Dirk Hovy

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. 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 CSS (hate speech and personality detection).

Recent Publications

The Language of Attachment: Modeling Attachment Dynamics in Psychotherapy

Frederik Bredgaard, Martin Lund Trinhammer, Elisa Bassignana
Pre-print

Paper

DaKultur: Evaluating the Cultural Awareness of Language Models for Danish with Native Speakers

Max Müller-Eberstein, Mike Zhang, Elisa Bassignana, Rob van der Goot
In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP 2025)

Paper Code

SnakModel: Lessons Learned from Training an Open Danish Large Language Model

Mike Zhang, Max Müller-Eberstein, Elisa Bassignana, Rob van der Goot
In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)

Paper Code

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 (2024, 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)