I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna in December 2010 with a final thesis on quantum computing. I then studied Cognitive Science at University College Dublin and devised an M.Sc. thesis (2013) on irony detection in Twitter data.
In 2017 I spent four months in Venice LA, to work on a project relative to multimodal analysis of emotions and emojis, at Snap Inc.
I recently received a Ph.D. in computer science (NLP) at UPF Barcelona. During my Ph.D. I studied figurative language that expresses irony, sarcasm, and satire through Twitter posts. I also explored the visual aspects of social media, analyzing images posted online (Instagram) and multimodal forms of communication such as emojis. I worked on automatic emoji prediction, interpretability, and gender/race biases in the usage of emojis.
I also worked in the music recommendation domain, working on multimodal systems (audio, image, text) for music genre recognition, collaborating with Pandora Radio.
I currently work at Snap Inc. as senior research scientist. My research focus is on social media text.
Teaching (2014-2018):________________________________________________________________________________________
Awards:
Best Ph.D. thesis award (SEPLN) 2019
Best paper award in WNUT-EMNLP September 2017 for the paper: Towards the Understanding of Gaming Audiences by Modeling Twitch Emotes.
Best oral presentation award ISMIR October 2017 for the paper: Multi-Label Music Genre Classification from Audio, Text and Images Using Deep Features
Best paper award in SEPLN September 2015 for the paper: Is This Tweet Satirical? A Computational Approach for Satire Detection in Spanish
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Some Resources
Dataset on satire, irony and humor in Twitter from my publications (only IDs as we are not allowed to share tweets direcltly)
USA Twitter embeddings: the focus of the paper is on emojis, but these embeddings can be used also for words. Updated the 15th of February 2016
How Cosmopolitan Are Emojis? We studied emojis in different languages, you can find our embeddings in the link.
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Media Coverage
2017
Crean inteligencia artificial predice los emoticonos más adecuados a un texto El Periodico
Ya es posible hacer una predicción de los Emoji que le corresponden a un texto El Economista
Emojis, ¿el nuevo lenguaje emocional ?- La Vanguardia Magazine
Tinder desvela los 20 emojis más usados por los españoles en su perfil - El Economista
2016
Emojis, un nuevo lenguaje universal - La Vanguardia
Los emojis más utilizados en diferentes países - Las Provincias
¿Son los emoticonos universales? - Voz Populi
Les emoticones més utilitzades són un llenguatge universal - TV3
Crean un método automático que extrae significado de los Emoticonos teléfono - La Vanguardia
Un mètode automàtic extreu el significat de les Emoticones del telèfon - Diari de Girona
2015
Todo al pie de la letra - La Vanguardia
Cómo distinguir un tuit satírico - Alef
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Conferences and Summer Schools
I have published and participated to international conferences like ACMMM, IJCAI, EACL, RANLP, WASSA, LREC and national conferences such as SEPLN (Spanish) and CLICIT (Italian).
I also attended a few summershools, including the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) and the Computational Creativity Code Camp (ICCCC)