My research interests are mainly in areas of Artificial
Intelligence. During my PhD and in the
following years I have been working on intelligent autonomous
agents reasoning and coordination, logic and argumentation-based
dialogue and negotiation, specification and verification of agent
interaction. In particular, I have been working on runtime
monitoring and exception handling in interaction protocols,
developing modeling frameworks to specify agent interaction using
declarative tools such as backward and forward rules, the event
calculus, and social commitments.
I became interested in the emerging field
of computational social sciences, where I believe that a great deal
of progress made in logical reasoning frameworks, especially
argumentation-based, and multi-agent systems, can find promising
application and have a positive impact on the society. I also
believe that computer science research, such as that discussed at
AAMAS, COMMA, IJCAI conferences and the like, can learn a great deal from other disciplines such as social and cognitive sciences and
philosophy.
Most recently my research has mainly focused on natural language processing: a rapidly expanding, broad of AI with significant applications. Some areas of interest in NLP are argumentation mining, which is concerned with the detection of argument from text in various genres and from speech, and legal analytics.
I worked hard to promote Computational Logic and MAS research through the activities of the Italian Association for Logic Programming (GULP), with my involvement in the steering committees of the DALT and CLIMA workshops series, and by organizing the ISCL and DALT Spring Schools. At DISI, I founded the language technologies lab, a vibrant research group currently involved in several collaborative research projects and topics.
