News | Daniela Occhipinti

Apr 28, 2026	On April 28th, I successfully defended my doctoral thesis on Persona-Based Dialogue Generation at the University of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, graduating with honors. It has been a demanding and deeply rewarding journey. Crossing this finish line feels like both a conclusion and a beginning. A heartfelt thank you to my advisors Dr. Marco Guerini and Prof. Malvina Nissim for their guidance throughout these years, to my colleagues for their constant support, and to everyone who believed in me along the way.
Nov 03, 2025	I am happy to share that I have started a new position as a Researcher in the Language and Dialogue Technologies Group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento. This feels like a natural next step in the research trajectory I have been building over the last few years, from profile-based dialogue datasets to work on data quality and interlocutor-aware generation. I am excited to keep developing that line of work in an environment where conversational AI, language technologies, and evaluation can be studied together.
Jul 28, 2025	Poster Presentation at ACL 2025 in Vienna
Jun 05, 2025	Our paper When Harry Meets Superman: The Role of The Interlocutor in Persona-Based Dialogue Generation has been accepted to the main ACL 2025 proceedings. This project is especially meaningful to me because it pushes my research beyond speaker-centered personas and toward a more relational view of dialogue: models do not just respond as someone, they respond to someone. The acceptance feels like an important milestone in the broader research path I am building around persona, interlocutors, and conversational adaptation.
Dec 04, 2024	Poster presentation at CLiC-it 2024
Aug 11, 2024	Poster presentation at ACL2024 in Bangkok
Jun 10, 2024	Poster presentation at NAACL2024 (virtual)
May 16, 2024	The paper Fine-tuning with HED-IT: The impact of human post-editing for dialogical language models has been accepted for publication in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024.
Apr 01, 2024	From April 1st to June 30th, I was a visiting PhD student at the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, supervised by Professor Malvina Nissim.
Mar 13, 2024	The paper PRODIGy: a PROfile-based DIalogue Generation dataset has been accepted for publication in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024.
Jul 04, 2022	From July 4th to 8th, 2022 I attended the Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (10th edition) in San Sebastian.
Nov 01, 2021	Started a PhD in Natural Language Generation at the Language and Dialogue Technologies (LanD) group under the supervision of Marco Guerini.
Dec 12, 2020	Our work ItaliaNLP @ TAG-IT: UmBERTo for Author Profiling at TAG-it 2020 on text author profiling has won the TAG-it task of #EVALITA2020.
Apr 30, 2020	I earned my master’s degree in Digital Humanities from the University of Pisa, with a thesis titled Industrial-Strength Multilingual Named Entity Collection for the SPIRIT Project.
Oct 01, 2018	I started my work on the SPIRIT European H2020 project.