Alessandra Teresa Cignarella

Alessandra works as a postdoctoral fellow in the field of Natural Language Processing. Her current research project is "RAINBOW - Researching Stereotypes towards LGBTQIA+ Community Members with Multilingual Natural Language Processing", funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (2024-2026).

Previously (2021-2023), she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin within the European project STERHEOTYPES which aimed at understanding the social and psychological processes emerging from Racial Hoaxes in digital communications across three Mediterranean European countries (Italy, Spain and France). Within the project different methodological approaches coming from social psychology and computational linguistics were integrated.

In 2021, she obtained my PhD in Computer Science (NLP), within the International Doctorate between the University of Turin and the Universitat Politècnica de València. The title of her PhD thesis is Dependency Syntax in the Automatic Detection of Irony and Stance.

In 2023, she also co-founded aequa-tech, an NLP startup based in Turin, with a great sensitivity concerning the issue of digital disparity. Inside the company, they aim at creating NLP tools within the reach of everyone. Right now aequa-tech is focusing on the issue of fake news and disinformation by creating their first product: Debunker-Assistant.