PATTI Viviana

Viviana Patti, PhD in Computer Science, is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Turin (Computer Science Department) and part of the scientific board and executive committee of the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition (LLC). She is currently a member of the board of directors of the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC). She has been member of the Guarantee Committee of the University of Turin, which develops and carries out actions to promote equal opportunities, well-being in the workplace and non-discrimination. Her main research interests are in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Affective Computing, and include sentiment analysis and emotion recognition (also applied to the cultural heritage domain) and irony detection, with a focus on social media texts. She is the principal investigator of the project M.EMO.RAI with RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana, the national public broadcasting company of Italy, where the main goal is measuring the emotional engagement of audiences of TV programs through social media. 

She is currently applying her research in the field of hate speech monitoring, in the context of the following projects, with a special focus on hate speech against immigrants, populist rhetoric and automatic misogyny identification: IHateprejudice (Immigrants, Hate and Prejudice in Social Media, funded by the Compagnia di San Paolo in 2017, Contro l’odio (Against hate: https://controlodio.it/, funded by the Italian Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, Avviso n. 1/2017 for funding initiatives and projects of national relevance) and the European project “STERHEOTYPES: STudying European Racial Hoaxes and sterEOTYPES” (funded in 2019 under the Challenge for Europe Call by Carlsberg Foundation, Volkswagen Stiftung and Compagnia San Paolo). On the same themes, the follow-up of Contro l’odio is one of the 29 projects recently selected among 900 proposals submitted in the context of the call "Google.org Impact Challenge on Safety”: https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/safety2019/charities/acmos-cifa (two-year grant). 

She is supervising a group of PhD students on these topics, also in co-tutelle with the Universitat Politècnica de València. 

She has (co-)authored 100+ peer-reviewed-publications and serves on editorial boards and multiple committees in top conferences. She led the development of Twitter corpora for sentiment analysis, emotion detection and hate speech detection in Italian, English and Spanish, exploited in shared tasks and international evaluation campaigns for different languages (Semeval, Ibereval, Evalita).