Francesca Padovani

News

• 4-9 November 2025
  Find me at EMNLP 2025!
  
• 25 September 2025
  InCLoW Reading Group Presentation
  I presented the paper Developmentally-plausible Working Memory Shapes a Critical Period for Language Acquisition by Masato Mita, Ryo Yoshida, Yohei Oseki. You can find the slides here.
• 6 September 2025
  Accepted BabyLM Challenge Paper
  Collaboration between my group (InCLow) and the CLAUSE group from the University of Bielefeld. You can find the paper here.
• 20 August 2025
  2 papers accepted at EMNLP 2025
  We received notification of acceptance of my submitted paper and the one that I co-authored with my lab mates and the Master student Ezgi Başar on the development of a Turkish Minimal Pair dataset to evaluate the formal competence of Turkish LMs.

Hi! I am a second year PhD Student of the Computational Linguistic Group at the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), the University of Groningen (NL). My research is conducted under the supervision of Arianna Bisazza and the co-supervision of Yevgen Matusevych and Jaap Jumelet. The VIDI project I am working on, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), focuses on improving language modeling for (low-resource) morphologically rich languages, taking inspiration from child language acquisition insights.

My research experience has been quite diverse, in line with the hybrid nature of my education. I have a humanistic background, since did classical studies during my high school (learning Latin and Ancient Greek). I then completed my Bachelor's degree in Psychology at the University of Trieste (Italy) and carried out my undergraduate internship in the Language,Learning and Reading Lab of the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit at SISSA, led by Davide Crepaldi. I then pursued a Master's degree in Data Science at the University of Trento (Italy). For my Master thesis I spent 6 months in the Language group of the Computer Science Lab Sony in Paris, where I was supervised by Martina Galletti and Remi van Trijp as part of a project aimed at building a multimedia interface to support Italian children with Learning Disabilities during therapy with speech therapists.