Elisa Bassignana

Elisa Bassignana

Postdoctoral Researcher in NLP

I am on the academic job market for 2026/2027 — seeking faculty and postdoc positions in Europe. Feel free to get in touch!

About Me

Hi, I'm Elisa!

I do research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science (CSS), with a particular interest in the interplay between (generative) AI and society. My research examines how the widespread adoption of AI is reshaping social inequalities, creating new forms of disadvantage while also amplifying existing ones. I study how AI technologies serve, or fail to serve, different social groups, depending on their needs and sociolects. My goal is to contribute to the development of more equitable and inclusive AI technologies.

I believe that socioeconomic status (SES) is the strongest driver of inequality in society and there are evidences of how it is now also shaping access to AI, patterns of AI engagement, and the benefits people derive from these technologies. For this reason, I advocate for a greater attention to SES in the development of new technologies.

Before focusing on AI fairness, I worked on Information Extraction. My PhD theses was on cross-domain Relation Extraction: building systems that identify semantic relations between entities and generalize robustly across domains and unseen label spaces.

I am affiliated with the MilaNLP group at Bocconi University, working with Prof. Dirk Hovy. I am also affiliated with the NLP North group at the IT University of Copenhagen and the Pioneer Center for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark.

I completed my PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, also affiliated with the MaiNLP lab at LMU Munich, supervised by Prof. Barbara Plank and Dr. Rob van der Goot.

Selected Publications

The AI Gap: How Socioeconomic Status Affects Language Technology Interactions

Elisa Bassignana*, Amanda Cercas Curry*, Dirk Hovy
In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)
(*): equal contribution
Best Social Impact Award at ACL 2025

Paper Data Slides Poster

Do Large Language Models Adapt to Language Variation across Socioeconomic Status?

Elisa Bassignana, Mike Zhang, Dirk Hovy, Amanda Cercas Curry
VarDial 2026

Paper Poster

Overreliance on AI in Information-seeking from Video Content

Anders Giovanni Møller, Elisa Bassignana, Francesco Pierri, Luca Maria Aiello
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

All publications