Francesca Padovani

News

• April 2026
  Auxiliary paper in preparation for the annual IEEE Conference on Games (IEEE CoG) 2026, in Madrid next September
  Together with Malvina Nissim (GroNLP) we are starting to structurally evaluating the experience of assembling a puzzle about conversational chatbots and GenAI and in the meantime we are introducing the project with an auxiliary paper. Have a look at the website
• April 2026
  New conference paper accepted at CogSci 2026
  The second work of my PhD Is Child-Directed Language Optimized for Word Learning? A Computational Study of Verb Meaning Acquisition has been accepted for an oral presentation at the next edition of CogSci in Rio de Janeiro next summer.
• January 2026
  This year I am part of the organizing committee of TabuDAG 2026.
  Here's the updated website. with the conference dates.
• 4-9 November 2025
  Find me at EMNLP 2025!
  

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.