Hi everyone! I’m Iris, a research associate of the Bonn Center for Digital Humanities. Here my position focuses on teaching, consulting, and working in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). At the University of Bonn, I give curricular and extracurricular courses to students of linguistics, offer technical support in matters of computational linguistics, and help students and research associates to navigate new technologies in the field.

Previously, I was a research assistant in the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University, in Alexander Koller’s research group. My reaserch focused on the Interactive cookbook project. You can find more info about the project here.

Due to my interdisciplinary academic background, my research interests range from NLP-oriented to pure linguistic matters. On one side, indeed, I explored language representations, dialogue systems, and graph-based semantics in my academic role at Saarland University. On the other hand, I’m deeply fascinated by the pragmatic use of language, especially through a cross-cultural and a cross-environmental lens.

Academic background

I did my Bachelor’s and Master’s of Arts at the University of Bonn in Deutsch-Italienische Studien (German and Italian studies), which brought me to the University of Florence for one and a half years. My strong passion for linguistics prompted my second Master’s of Arts in Applied Linguistics, that I faced with the support of a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

An internship at the Fraunhofer Institut for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg has opened the doors of the field of Computational Linguistics to me. I graduated at the institute in 2021 under the supervision of Ulrich Schade and Daniel Claeser; my dissertation carries the title “Uncovering Twitter’s account closure and suspension algorithm with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP): An investigation of the role of language in an account’s deactivation”.

For more info

More info about my career path can be found here.

Outside my work in academia, I love to travel, paint, dance, and -conformly with my Italian origins- cook.