Associate professor at Università di Bologna since 2022, he works on natural language processing and information retrieval. Alberto is particularly interested in analysing certain qualities of text, from originality to intent. Lately, he has turned his attention to the analysis of news and propaganda.
Education
PhD in Computer Science from Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain, 2012). He holds one masters degree in AI from the same university (2009) and one masters in Computing Science from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico, 2007). He studied Computing Engineering at the same university (2004).
Academic Career
Before joining UNIBO, where he was senior assistant professor since 2019, Alberto spent 4.5 years at Qatar Computing Research Institute, where he worked on (community) question answering, propaganda analysis, and Wikipedia as a multilingual resource, among other topics. Previous to that, he was an ERCIM Alain Bensoussan fellow at TALP Research Centre for 2 years, where he worked on making sense of user feedback to MT systems and Wikipedia as a comparable corpus, among others.
Teaching Activity
MA in Specialized Translation, Università di Bologna, Italy:
- 2022-today: Natural Language Processing (2nd year)
- 2022-today: Advanced Skills: Creation of datasets for NLP (2nd year)
- 2021-today: Profession-based Research (1st year)
- 2019-2022: Computational Linguistics (1st year)
- 2019-today: Game and Software Localization (2nd year)
BEng in Computing, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
- 2006-2007: Artificial Intelligence (4th year)
- 2005-2007: Computing and Programming (1st year)
Scientific Activity
Alberto has published 100+ scientific papers, including 13 in journals with impact factor and 20+ in top-tier conferences. He was chair man of the 2022 edition of CLEF, the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. He is also part of the committee of numerous journals and conferences on computing science.
Prizes
2020 - Best SemEval 2020 task (honourable mention). Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles.
2020: Best demo paper at ACL 2020 (honourable mention). Prta: A System to Support the Analysis of Propaganda Techniques in the News.
2012 - Ph.D. international mention, Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
2009 - Best M.Sc. thesis on Language Technologies, MAVIR (Spain)
2007 - M.Sc degree, cum laude , National University of Mexico (Mexico)
2004 - BEng. cum laude , National University of Mexico (Mexico)
