Hi! I'm Associate Professor at the University of Padova, Italy. My research interestes are in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning. Together with prof. Giogio Satta, I lead the NLP group at the University of Padova. I have lead several projects around the topic of disinformation and propaganda , with specific focus on the analysis of the rhetorical devices that drive persuasion and manipulation.

 

Research

My research interests are at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the area of ML I have worked on learning algorithms for trees and graphs and on Swarm Intelligence. In the are of NLP I have worked on (community) question answering, paraphrase, entailment detection and bias in word embeddings. Moreover, I focused on the analysis of the rhetorical devices that drive persuasion and manipulation, with application to disinformation detection and propaganda campaigns.

Publications

Updated lists of publications I co-authored are available at

ACL Anthology (NLP)

DBLP (NLP + ML)

Google Scholar (All)

I have received a best paper award at WebSCI 2022 and two honourable mentions at ACL 2020 and SemEval 2021.

 

Ph.D courses

  • Natural Language Processing - 12 hours for the PhD school "Brain,Mind and Computer Science" (since 2023/2024)

Master's degree courses

  • Natural Language Processing (Computer Science and Data Science Masters' degrees) - since 2023/2024
  • Machine Learning (Data Science Masters' degree) - from 2021/2022 to 2023/2024
  • Advanced Topics in Computer Science (Computer Science Masters' degree) - 2020/2021

Bachelor's degree courses

  • Programmazione (bachelor's degree in Informatica) - since 2022/2023
  • Informatica e Bioinformatica (bachelor's degree in Biology) - 2020/2021
  • Lecturer for 4 courses: “Informatics and Bioinformatics (Informatica e Bioinformatica)” held at the Department of Biology for the Biology and Molecular Biology bachelor degrees, University of Padova in the year 2011-2012 and in the year 2012-2013.

Projects

Project for the Extended Consortium SERICS - funded by NextGenerationEU

Leader of the consortium for a project funded under DETERRENCE (DEcision supporT systEm foR cybeR intelligENCE), which is part of “SEcurity and RIghts in the CyberSpace (SERICS)” - Spoke 2 “Misinformation and Fakes” Ambito progettuale. Project duration: from 01-09-2023 to 31-12-2025

"Critical Digital Literacy"

Local Principal Investigator for the cluster project "The Future of Digitai Citizenship in Qatar: a Socio-Technical Approach" funded by the Qatar National Research Fund ("QNRF'). Project duration: from 01-07-2023 to 01-07-2026.

"A Corpus for Persuasion Techniques in Multimodal Data"

Principal Investigator for the project "A Corpus for Persuasion Techniques in Multimodal Data", funded by Meta. Project duration: from 01-05-2021 to 01-11-2023.

"Quantitative Analysis and Prediction of the Outcomes of Influence Campaigns on Social Networks"

Leading Principal Investigator for the project ``Quantitative Analysis and Prediction of the Outcomes of Influence Campaigns on Social Networks'', funded by the Department of Mathematics, University of Padova. Project duration: from 01-09-2022 to 01-09-2023.

Service Activities


Organisation

  • General Chair of the CLEF 2022 conference, 5-9 September 2022, Bologna.
  • Chair of the The 17th and 18th edition of the International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), years 2023/2024
  • Chair of the workshop series “CheckThat! at CLEF 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims” at CLEF 2018, 2019, 2020.
  • Chair of the workshop series "NLP4IF: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda", EMNLP 2019, COLING 2020.
  • Organisers of SemEval shared tasks: SemEval 2020 task 10, SemEval 2021 task 6, SemEval 2023 Task 3, SemEval 2024 Task 4, SemEval 2025 task 10.
  • Organiser of the Workshop "Bias, Disinformation, Misinformation and Propaganda in Online News and Social Media" at Social Informatics 2019
  • Organiser of the "cQA Challenge: Learning to Re-Rank Questions for Community Question Answering" shared task and workshop at ECML-PKDD 2016
  • Organiser and Board member of the master’s degree in “Computational Finance”

Reviewing Activity

  • Area Chair for ACL ARR
  • Action Editor for the Neural Networks journal
  • Member of the Editorial Board of Information Processing & Management (IP&M) journal until June 25, 2025
  • Area chair for ACL-2019 in the question answering track and for ACL-2020 in the NLP applications track
  • Senior program committee member for AAAI-2020, AAAI-2021, AAAI-2022

 

Software

SVM-Light Add-ons

Various kernels for trees and utilities implemented as modules of Alessandro Moschitti's SVM-lighT-TK 1.2 software, which, in turn, is based on SVM-Light 5.01 by Thorsten Joachims.

Biomarkers

A software for integrating biological knowledge, in the form of similarity matrices, into the learning process.

Python Tree Kernels

A set of classes to handle trees and compute kernel functions on them.

Contact Information


Department of Mathematics "Tullio Levi-Civita",
University of Padova
Office number 4AB7
c/o Torre Archimede
via Trieste, 63
35121 Padova, Italy

Office phone number: 0498271482

Email: dasan[]math.unipd.it (replace [] with @)