About

I moved on to Elektrobit Automotive in Erlangen, Germany. The information below is thus outdated. Please check out my LinkedIn or Xing profiles instead. Thank you.

I was a research assistant at the KRDB Centre, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Colleagues I worked with include Raffaella Bernardi, Marco Baroni and Massimo Poesio. Raffaella and I have been cooperating with the University library on a project to build a multi-lingual chat-bot (BoB, the Bozen-Bolzano Chat-Bot). Since launching this system (which we recently made available as an open source chatterbot-bob project) on the Library web-site, we have been using its dialogue log files to study naturally occurring IQA dialogues, where our special interest lies in the Follow-Up Questions that users have asked. Please check out the BoB dialogue corpus web-site for more details on these data, and how to get a copy for research purposes.

We have been experimenting with empirically based models that capture the role of the dialogue context for answering Follow-Up Questions. Our results are of both theoretical and practical interest: they describe the inherent structure of realistic IQA dialogues in terms of (shallow) semantic/pragmatic relations, and they provide directions towards how an IQA system should tackle context fusion to improve answering of Follow-Up Questions.

This work resulted in my PhD thesis, which I defended in March 2010. Please check out the academic section of my homepage for the abstract or the full version of the thesis.