Francesca Padovani

News

• 12-13 June 2025
  TabuDAG Conference, CLCG, University of Groningen
  I will attend TabuDAG and present the result of my first paper with an oral presentation on the 12th of June, 2.00 p.m. Find the full program at TabuDAG.
• May 2025
  EMNLP Sumbission
  I submitted my first paper to the ACL Rolling Review. The title is Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models and it is now available on arXiv.
• from 30.03.2025 to 04.04.2025
  ALPS Winter School in Aussois (French Alps)
  I will attend the Speech and Natural Language Processing winter school in the Alps and present a poster on my current research.
• 26/27.03.2025
  HumanCLAIM Workshop Göttingen (Germany)
  On the 26th and 27th of March I will attend the HumanCLAIM Workshop and I will present a poster 'What is the real benefit of using Child Directed Language for Language Modeling?' on my ongoing research

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.