Blog

October, 2026

At EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, I was on a panel with Mor Geva, Lillian Lee, and Raymond Mooney about New Missions in NLP Research. The panel is on Underline, but if you cannot access it, here is a write-up of my main points.

July, 2026

Academia often mistakes effort for value. Everyone learns that the hard way when 90% of the work you put into your first project barely gets a mention in the final paper.

April, 2026

When my university, Bocconi, introduced OpenAI access to all faculty, staff, and students in June 2025, a colleague approached me and asked what we should do “now that the students have access to AI”.

March, 2026

There is a lot of excitement — and anxiety — around the idea that AI models are now “training their own successors.” This kind of hype makes for good headlines, but flawed discussion.

November, 2025

After publishing “ How to professor”, several people said they found it helpful, and asked whether I had a similar post on writing. Luckily, we have held an annual writing workshop in the lab for the last few years, so there already was a presentation.

January, 2025

It feels not long ago that I was worried about my job applications, but in reality, I have done this long enough that some of my first MSc supervisees are professors of their own now.

September, 2017

If you have been to ACL in Vancouver or followed the news on Twitter, you know that it was the biggest conference of its kind. And EMNLP, held in Copenhagen in September, could again claim the same for itself, too, with more than 1200 participants and more long paper submissions than ACL.

October, 2016

It’s All about the He said, She said―A Quantitative Analysis of the Three Presidential Debates The question what constitutes an acceptable sentence is a matter of taste, and would elicit very different answers from a moral philosopher, a linguist, and a logician.

July, 2016

In a recent article in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki outlined how, back in the 1960s, professional athletes considered strength training akin to cheating: either you were good at sports, or you weren’t―training had nothing to do with it.

September, 2015

As mentioned before, I sometimes use my academic knowledge of natural language processing for purposes other than research. A friend recently told me about an entertaining game where you gerundivize words in movie titles (i.