We are honored to host a special session of CLiC-it 2025 with Prof. Paola Merlo. The session will be an open space for lively and thoughtful discussions about important research in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, highlighting both exciting theoretical ideas and real-world applications. The discussion will take place in an interview format.
To promote active and inclusive participation, we launch a call for interest open to all conference participants, with a special focus on young researchers, to collect questions to be addressed by Prof. Merlo during the interview.
Questions may cover a wide range of topics related to research in these areas, including (but not limited to):
- current challenges and emerging methodologies in NLP and computational linguistics;
- future research directions, particularly in relation to the evolution of language models and recent transformations in the field of artificial intelligence;
- dialogue between computational and theoretical approaches in the study of language;
- interdisciplinary implications and possible impacts on the study of formal linguistics, cognitive linguistics, or psycholinguistics;
- the role of ethics and social responsibility in the development of NLP systems, especially with regard to the processing of natural language.
Feel free to submit yours through the linked Google Form:
We will select the most interesting and relevant questions and invite the authors to pose them to Prof. Merlo live during the session.
Prof. Paola Merlo is a senior research scientist at the Idiap Research Institute, where she leads the research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics (CLCL) and is also an associate professor at the University of Geneva. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, USA. She has been an associate research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting scholar at Edinburgh, Stanford and an adjunct professor at Uppsala University.
Prof. Merlo is an ACL Fellow and the past editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics, has been an elected member of several executive committees of the ACL and has served as general chair and committee member of many main ACL conferences.
She is currently involved in the centre of competence in research on the evolution of language, NCCR Evolving Language, and has been awarded an SNSF Advanced grant.
Her research is highly interdisciplinary, combining linguistic modelling with machine learning techniques, mostly to study the automatic learning of syntactic and semantic properties across many languages. The main current focus revolves around the interpretation of representations of the lexical semantics of verbs, as created by neural networks. To this end, a new task has been developed, inspired by human IQ tests, that bridges issues of language and reasoning. In collaborations with colleagues, her group has started investigations on the human behaviour when solving these tasks and is exploring ethical and gender-bias issues raised by current deep learning models.