About me

I'm an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Dublin City University and Academic Lead for the MSc in Artificial Intelligence (part-time). I am a funded investigator in the ADAPT 2 and I-Form centres, where I am conducting research in the area of personalisation applied to access to information and recommender systems. In the ADAPT 2 centre, I am leading the Proactive Experience & Agency challenge within the Digitally Enhanced Engagement strand. My research is in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Information Access and Retrieval, and Machine Learning. Since my Ph.D., I have been tackling problems related to text representation and its impact on intelligent information access. I focused on different ways of representing text through Word Sense Disambiguation, Distributional Semantics, and Entity Linking. Prior to this appointment, I was an EDGE COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action research fellow in the ADAPT centre at Trinity College Dublin in the domain of Temporal Aware Personalised Information Retrieval. As part of this fellowship, I was on secondment in Ryanair, collaborating on the application of the project’s algorithms to Ryanair’s huge user base.

Before joining ADAPT, I worked as a research fellow at University of Bari Aldo Moro within the SWAP (Semantic Web Access and Personalization) research group, which focuses on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing with practical application to Information Access Systems (Information Retrieval and Recommenders). My research activity concerned Entity Linking for Intelligent Information Access: the aim of that research was to provide a semantic representation of unstructured text through named entities and their relationships mentioned in the text content. This kind of representation would enable the intelligent reasoning, discovery and retrieval of relevant pieces of information as well as the suggestion of serendipitous items.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Bari Aldo Moro defending the thesis “Semantics and Information Retrieval: Models, Techniques and Applications". Since my Ph.D. I have been working in the area of NLP and Information Retrieval by focusing on the text representation problem, which I tackled with both Word Sense Disambiguation and Distributional Semantics. To this respect, Entity Linking represents a further step toward the concept-based representation of textual content.

I have participated in different evaluation campaigns in the areas of Information Retrieval (CLEF 2008-2009, Kaggle Allen AI Science Challenge), Lexical Semantics (SemEval 2012, *SEM 2013, SemEval 2015) and Entity Scoring and Linking (WSDM Cup 2017, NEEL 2015). I co-organised two evaluation campaigns (Question Answering for Frequently Asked Questions and Named Entity rEcognition and Linking in Italian Tweets Tasks) at EVALITA 2016, the Diachronic Lexical Semantics in Italian at EVALITA 2020, and co-organized the 1st Workshop on Temporal Dynamics in Digital Libraries at the 21st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries.

I am Guest Editor for KGSR 2021: "Special Issue Knowledge Graphs for Search and Recommendation" on Information (MDPI) and General Co-Chair for ECIR 2023, the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval.