Francesca Padovani

Hi! I am a first year PhD Student of the Computational Linguistic Group at the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), the University of Groningen (NL). My research is done under the supervision of Arianna Bisazza and the co-supervision of Yevgen Matusevych. 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.