The aim of Dr. Moschitti's work is to carry out advanced research on Machine Learning methods for syntactic and semantic processing of natural language. The associated applications regard the design of state-of-the-art Information Search and Retrieval systems based on advanced language models and structural semantic representations: a typical example is given by automatic Question Answering systems.

Dr. Moschitti has been the only European Faculty member to participate with IBM Watson research center of NY in the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge. He has significant expertise in both theoretical and applied Machine Learning for NLP, IR and Data Mining. He has devised innovative kernels for advanced syntactic/semantic processing with support vector and other kernel-based machines. He is an author or co-author of about 170 scientific articles published in major conferences, e.g., ACL, SIGIR, ICDM, ICML, CIKM, ECML, EMNLP, IJCAI, etc., and journals, e.g., Comp. Ling., IPM, DMKD, IS-IEEE, TASL-IEEE, etc. He has been granted and led several EU projects among which: LiMoSINe (STREP IST 288024) – partner PI, ETERNALS (CA, IST 247758) – Consortium PI, and LIVINGKNOWLEDGE (FET – IP IST 231126) – WP leader.

• Tenured Assistant Professor (2007 – present), Computer Science Department of the University of Trento.
• Visiting Research Scientist (discontinuously, 2009 – 2012) at the IBM Watson Research Center, New York, US (the Grand Jeopardy! Challenge).
• Visiting Professor (February – March 2011) at the Computational Linguistic and Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO, US.
•  Visiting Professor (July – October 2008) at the Center for Computational Learning Systems of Columbia University, New York, US.
• Senior Researcher of the Summer Workshop (July – August 2007) at the Center for Language and Speech Processing of John Hopkins University, Baltimore, US.
• Visiting Research Scientist (February – March 2007) at the CCLS, Columbia University, New York, US.
• Research Associate (Nov. 2004 – Jan. 2006) at the Computer Science Department of the University of “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy.
• Research Associate (Nov. 2002 – July 2004) at the HLT Research Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas, US.
• Visiting Scholar (June 2002 – Nov. 2002) at the CS Department of the University of Texas at Dallas, US.

Awards

• IBM SUR award 2013
• Google-Faculty Award 2011, Opinion Mining from YouTube, Google EMEA, Switzerland.
• IBM-Faculty Award 2011 on Structural Reranking
• Best Student Paper Award in Machine Learning at The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2011.
• IBM-Faculty Award 2010 for a collaboration on the Jeopardy! project.
• Best Paper Award at The International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing 2010.
• Best Student Paper Award at the workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data, 2010.

Associations

• Journal Editorial Board: The Scientific World Journal Editorial Board (since 2013), JAIR since 2012, JoDS, since 2011, Guest Editor for JNLE 2012 and 2013, Guest Editor for JMLR 2013.
• Chair/Organizer: General Chair of EMNLP 2014 (Doha), Sponsorship and co-chair for (E)ACL 2014, area co-Chair for Semantics of ACL 2013, area Chair for Semantic Processing of IJCNLP 2013, senior PC member of IJCAI 2013, area chair for ECML PKDD 2012, co-Chair for the tutorials of ECML PKDD 2012, co-Chair for the CoNLL-shared task 2012, co-Chair for the workshops of EACL 2012, area co-Chair of Machine Learning (ML) for ACL 2011, co-Chair of The First, Second and Third, EternalS workshops, co-Chair of TextGraphs 2010 and TextGraphs 2011 workshops, chair of the workshops of AIIA2007, co-Chair of the workshop on Structured Information in NLP 2006, Organization Committee of SCIE 2002.
• PC member of more than 30 different conferences and workshops (for several years), among which: ECML, ICML, SIGIR, CIKM, ACL, EACL, EMNLP, COLING, ASRU, CoNLL, NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, RANLP, Interspeech, ...
• Reviewer for more than 33 journals (for several years) among which: PAMI, IEEE IS, JAIR, JMLR, MLJ, IEEE-TKDE, JNLE, CLJ, IRJ, Elsevier IS, ACM-TALIP, JAIT, AIJ, and so on.

• PhD in Computer Science and Control Engineering, University of Rome, “Tor Vergata”, Italy, November 2003.
• MSc in Computer Science, summa cum laude, Department of Computer Science at University of Rome, “La Sapienza”, Italy, March, 1998.

• A. Moschitti, A study on Convolution Kernels for Shallow Semantic Parsing. In proceedings of the 42-th Conference on Association for Computational Linguistic (ACL), Barcelona, Spain, 2004.
• A. Moschitti, Efficient Convolution Kernels for Dependency and Constituent Syntactic Trees. In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), Berlin, Germany, 2006.
• A. Moschitti, Kernel Methods, Syntax and Semantics for Relational Text Categorization. In proceeding of ACM 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). Napa Valley, California, 2008.
• A. Moschitti, D. Pighin and R. Basili. Tree kernels for Semantic Role Labeling. Special Issue on Semantic Role Labeling, Computational Linguistics Journal. 2008.
• A. Moschitti, Q. Ju, R. Johansson. Modeling Topic Dependencies in Hierarchical Text Categorization. In proceedings of the 50-th Conference on Association for Computational Linguistic (ACL), Jeju Island, Korea, 2012.