Francesca Padovani

News

• 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.
• 14 August 2025
  BabyLM Challenge 2025 Submission
  Together with other researchers from Bielefeld University, we submitted a paper for the third edition of the BabyLM Challenge.
• 28 July 2025
  BabyBabelLM Submission
  We submitted a project that started from the grassroots level and involved around 30 researchers from around the world to create the first multilingual dataset of developmentally plausible data.
• 12 June 2025
  InCLoW Reading Group Presentation
  I presented two inspiring papers for my research; both use Reinforcement Learning to finetune models, but with different tasks and types of rewards. Check the slides here.

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.