Gabriella Lapesa

Dr. Gabriella Lapesa is a Senior Lecturer and NLP researcher at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart, leading the E-DELIB research group funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). Her work focuses on interdisciplinary applications of NLP in political science, cognitive modeling, and theoretical linguistics. She is a member of the Theoretical Computational Linguistics and Foundations of Computational Linguistics groups at IMS and an associate member of the MARDY DFG project.

Education:

• PhD in Cognitive Science (University of Osnabrück), supervised by Prof. Stefan Evert
• MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (University of Pisa)
• BA in Humanities Computing (University of Pisa)

Research Interests:

Her research spans political discourse analysis (e.g., tracing immigration debates through newspaper reports), cognitive modeling (predicting priming effects), and theoretical linguistics (semantics of derivation). She also develops robust evaluation strategies for distributional semantic models and collaborates on tools for digital direct democracy support.

Publications:

Recent work includes studies on argument mining for social good, cross-lingual transfer in low-resource scenarios, and discourse quality annotation. Her contributions bridge NLP with political science, emphasizing tools for deliberative systems and automated analysis of policy debates.

Grants & Leadership:

• Principal investigator for E-DELIB (2020–present)
• Organizer of the Computational Linguistics for Political and Social Sciences working group

Labs & Teams:

She leads the E-DELIB team and collaborates with the MARDY project, focusing on relational annotation of political debates. Her group develops tools like the DEbateNet-mig15 dataset and the LexIt resource for Italian argument structure.