Overview | Research directions | Members | Publications | Ongoing Collaborations

Overview

Linguistics aims at understanding the place of language within other human cognitive faculties. Along the way, it tries to answer questions that range from the inner working of individual constructions to broad models of the way language might have evolved, how it is processed in the brain and which of its aspects might be the by-product of biological constraints. We address these issues with a wide range of tools, from theoretical analysis to computer modeling to brain data of sentence processing.

We also offer consultation service for researchers  interested in gathering linguistic data or using the local computational facilities to set up linguistic experiments.

Research directions​

  • The Syntax/Semantics Interface: Nominals as Arguments and Predicates - Our more theoretical work addresses fundamental issues in the semantics of nominals: what is the difference between nominals used to refer to things and nominals used to attribute properties to things (SynCoP project, with Caroline Heycock and Jutta Hartmann); how definiteness is expressed even in language that have no definite articles; how we refer to classes of objects or make generalizations on them; how the “part of” and the “equal to” relations are expressed across languages. At a broader level, we are interested in fostering a fruitful interplay between denotation- and  distribution-based semantics. 
  • Linguistic analysis of artificial models of human language - A second side of our research is concerned with the analysis of the capabilities and representations developed by current machine learning models of language (e.g. LSTMs, Transformer models). One way to do this is to test the extent to which computational language models (especially, models trained on human-sized amounts of linguistic data) can achieve metalinguistics intuitions; another, to look at the extent to which they align with brain patterns of human subject as they listen to language.
  • Novel approaches to linguistic data collection - Another ongoing project involves analyzing the EEG of subjects that hear or mentally repeat sentences (REPLAI PRIN project, with Francesco Vespignani), to see the difference and similarities between the two phases. Finally, we are looking a the use of online games (see www.actorschallenge.eu) to both gather and validate oral linguistic data on the prosody-to-meaning mapping.

Members

Current Staff

Former Staff-students
  • Luca Ducceschi, former postdoc researcher
  • Aria Nourbakhsh, former research fellow
  • Michelangelo Falco, former postdoc researcher
  • Matteo Mascelloni, former LMI Master student
  • Andrea de Varda, former LMI student
  • Natallia Chaiko, former research fellowship holder

Publications

Theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics:

  • Falco, Michelangelo; Zamparelli, Roberto, Discourse-Linked DPs as Covert Partitives: Ellipsis and pro-form strategies in Italian and English in ISOGLOSS, v. 10, n. 3 (2024), p. 1-33.  
  • Zamparelli, Roberto, (2020), Countability shifts and abstract nouns, in Friederike Moltmann (edited by), Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosopy, and Cognitive Science, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020, p. 191-224
  • Falco, Michelangelo; Zamparelli, Roberto, Partitives and partitivity, in GLOSSA, v. 4, n. 1 (2019), p. 1-49. - DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.642
  • Mascelloni, Matteo; Zamparelli, Roberto; Vespignani, Francesco; Gruber, Thomas; Mueller, Jutta L, Distinct neural processes for memorizing form and meaning within sentences, in FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE, v. 13, n. 412 (2019), p. [n.d.]-[n.d.]. - DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00412

Computational / Methodological

  • Sepanta, Sia Vosh; Chaiko, Natallia; Zamparelli, Roberto, "Actors Challenge”: Collecting Data to Study Prosodic Patterns and Their Mappings to Meanings Across Languages in Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing @ LREC-COLING 2024, Torino, Italia: ELRA and ICCL, 2024, p. 1-5
  • Hanna, Michael; Zamparelli, Roberto; Mareček, David, The Functional Relevance of Probed Information: A Case Study in Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Dubrovnik, Croatia: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023, p. 835-848. - ISBN: 978-1-959429-44-9.
  • Zamparelli, Roberto; Chowdhury, Shammur; Brunato, Dominique; Chesi, Cristiano; Dell’Orletta, Felice; Hasan, Md. Arid; Venturi, Giulia, SemEval-2022 Task 3: PreTENS - Evaluating Neural Networks on Presuppositional Semantic Knowledge in Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022), Seattle, United States: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022, p. 228-238. - ISBN: 978-1-955917-80-3. Atti di: SemEval-2022, Seattle, United States, 10-15 luglio 2022.  
  • Brunato, Dominique; Chesi, Cristiano; Dell'Orletta, Felice; Montemagni, Simonetta; Venturi, Giulia; Zamparelli, Roberto, AcCompl-it @ EVALITA2020: Overview of the Acceptability & Complexity Evaluation Task for Italian in Proceedings of the Seventh Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. Final Workshop (EVALITA 2020)
  • Chowdhury, Shammur Absar; Zamparelli, Roberto, RNN Simulations of Grammaticality Judgments on Long-distance Dependencies, in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: COLING, Santa Fa, NM, USA: ICCL, 2018, p. 133-144

For a complete list see  Roberto Zamparelli personal page

Ongoing collaborations

  • Cristiano Chesi, IULM, Pavia
  • Prof. Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh
  • Jutta Hartmann, University of Bielefeld
  • Shammur Chuwdhury, Qatar Computing Research Institute
  • Michelangelo Falco, ZAS, Berlin
  • Prof. Vespignani, University of Padova
  • Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa