Elena Callegari
Ph.D. in Linguistics,
Co-founder of SageWrite
About Me
Hi! I am a linguist and lecturer in Language Technology based in Reykjavík, Iceland.
I have a PhD in Linguistics (Syntax - Pragmatics interface) from the University of Oslo, an MA in Psycholinguistics from Utrecht University (Netherlands) and a BA in Language Sciences from Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy).
At the moment I am working as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in Language and Technology at the University of Iceland. I am currently teaching two courses: Clinical NLP, and Natural Language Generation. The focus of my postdoc is on developing software that can automatically detect dementia based on how an individual speaks.
I am also the co-founder of SageWrite, an Icelandic startup that is developing text-generation tools for academic writing using deep learning. SageWrite was born in late 2021 and we currently have 5 permanent staff in our team.
In 2023, I won a Horizon-2020 Women TechEU grant, which is a grant for women that have founded deep-tech startups in Europe. This is the first time an applicant from Iceland ever wins this grant!
Some of the topics I am interested in are word order variation in the left periphery, topicalization in Romance and Germanic languages, focus particles in Mande and Slavic languages, natural language generation and transformers, clinical applications of NLP, and modeling the complexity found in human languages.
Outside of linguistics I am also interested in politics, astronomy, complexity science and science fiction.
PAPERS, MANUSCRIPTS AND HANDOUTS
Enhancing Academic-Paper Title Generation Using SciBERT and Linguistic Rules.
We refine automatic title generation using linguistic-stylistic rules and SciBERT.
— Proceedings of IJCNLP-AACL 2023: The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
The Relative Order of Foci and Polarity Complementizer: a Slavic Perspective
Comparative study of ten different Slavic languages on the order of foci and polarity complementizers.
— Linguistic Variation 22(1), 78-122.
Polarity-Induced Fronting
Account of the different fronting strategies available in Romance languages in polarity-focus environments.
— Probus, accepted.
Controlled Text Generation Using Metrics from a Target Text Allows for Transparency in the Absence of Specialized Knowledge.
We control automatic abstract generation by extracting linguistic metrics from a target text.
— Proceedings of CHItaly 2023: the 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter, GENERAL23 (GENerative, Explainable and Reasonable Artificial Learning) Workshop.
Automatic Extraction of Cross-Linguistic Biomarkers of Healthy Aging in Icelandic.
How is healthy aging reflected in language production? We look at Icelandic specifically.
— Under Review.
Predicting the Presence of Inline Citations in Academic Text Using Binary Classification
We use Sci-BERT to predict the presence of inline academic citations.
— In The 24rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, (2023, March).
A Corpus For Article Analysis
On the structure of the manually-annotated SageWrite corpus, a corpus for the fine-tuning of NLG algorithms.
— Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB 2022) (pp. 13-21).
The ACoDe Project: Creating a Dementia Corpus for Icelandic.
On the collection and transcription protocol behind the ACoDe corpus.
— Proceedings of Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) Conference 2023.
Age Classification of Icelandic Speech using Sequential Feature Elimination
We propose an age classifier for Icelandic speech that was trained on the Samrómur dataset.
— Under Review
Linguistic strategies to present complexity in a time of crisis
On the linguistic strategies adopted by different European leaders to present the complexity associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
— "Remedies against the Pandemic. How politicians communicate crisis management", 2023, John Benjamins.
Topicalization: The IO/DO Asymmetry in Icelandic
Account of the differences in frequency between IO and DO topicalization in Icelandic With A.K. Ingason.
— Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 105 (2021), 1–17
Exclamative Se Constructions, LSRL53 slides + examples
Slides and list of examples.
— LSRL53, 2023
Intro to Syntax - Lecture 3 slides
Lecture 3 slides: constituency and trees.
— Course at Palacky University in Olomouc, April 2022.
The Focus Architecture of Jula of Tougan: when presentational focus does it all.
On the focus architecture of Jula of Tougan, a Mande variety spoken in Northern Burkina Faso.
— Manuscript
Étude comparative de la pragmatique de la topicalisation du sujet en français standard et en trévisan
Comparative analysis of the pragmatics of subject topicalization in French and Trevigiano (Northern Italian dialect). With E. Klævik-Pettersen.
— Scolia- Revue de Linguistique 34, 2020
Topicalized PPs: Movement or Internal Merge?
Are Italian topicalized PPs moved or base-generated? We run an experiment to find out. With R. Pulicani.
— Proceedings of LE, 2020
Understanding Word Order in the Left Periphery
My PhD thesis! On making sense of the relative ordering of different types of left-peripheral constituents.
— University of Oslo press
Mande: Closely related languages, different focus architectures
Slides of my ACAL (Annual Conference on African Languages) 2022 talk.
— Jall
contact me
Agree or disagee on any of my ideas?
Got any interesting suggestions?
Know of any language other than Bulgarian where a topic can precede a relative operator?
Then get in touch with me at this email address:
ecallegari@hi.is