CV
Daniela Occhipinti — AI researcher and engineer. Experience, education, publications and skills spanning conversational AI research and practical LLM systems.
My work connects research on persona-based dialogue and interlocutor adaptation with designing, developing and evaluating LLM applications, RAG pipelines and AI agents. I currently work as an AI Engineer at Ricca IT.
General Information
| Full Name | Daniela Occhipinti |
| dani.occhipinti91@gmail.com | |
| Location | Trento, Italy |
Education
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2021 - 2026 PhD in Information Engineering and Computer Science
University of Trento & Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy - PhD completed with honors, April 2026. Research focus on persona-based dialogue generation and interlocutor-aware conversational AI.
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2017 - 2020 M.Sc. in Digital Humanities (Language Technologies)
University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy -
2012 - 2016 B.A. in Digital Humanities
University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Experience
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Current AI Engineer
Ricca IT - Designing and developing LLM-based applications, RAG pipelines and AI agents.
- Testing systems in practical use cases and designing evaluation pipelines with LLMs and agents as judges.
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Previously Researcher
Language and Dialogue Technologies Group, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) -
Nov 2020 - Oct 2021 NLP Engineer
TopNetwork S.p.A. -
Mar 2020 - Oct 2020 NLP Engineer
Aptus.AI -
Nov 2018 - Mar 2020 Junior Researcher
Live Srl - Synthema - Contributed to the EU H2020 SPIRIT project on privacy-preserving intelligence analysis.
Publications
- Stranger, Fan, or Peer? A Systematic Study on the Role of Interlocutor in Persona-Based Dialogue Generation. EMNLP 2026.
- When Harry Meets Superman: The Role of The Interlocutor in Persona-Based Dialogue Generation. ACL 2025.
- Fine-tuning with HED-IT: The impact of human post-editing for dialogical language models. Findings of ACL 2024.
- PRODIGy: a PROfile-based DIalogue Generation dataset. Findings of NAACL 2024.
- ItaliaNLP @ TAG-IT: UmBERTo for Author Profiling at TAG-it 2020. EVALITA 2020.
Awards and Honors
- PhD in Information Engineering and Computer Science — graduated with honors, University of Trento & FBK, 2026.
- 1st place in all subtasks of TAG-it at EVALITA 2020 (author profiling shared task).
Skills
- LLM applications; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); AI agents; LLM/agent-based evaluation.
- Python; PyTorch; Hugging Face ecosystem; Docker; data collection & evaluation for NLG.
Languages
- Italian (native)
- English (fluent)
Research Interests
- Natural Language Generation; persona-based dialogue generation; evaluation of conversational agents.