Francesco De Toni

Dr. Francesco De Toni is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communication in Health Care, School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics, The Australian National University (ANU). He also serves as a Senior Project Officer for the Western Australian Department of Health, leading voice-to-text digital scribe implementations for clinical documentation. His research bridges computational linguistics, language and health, and emotion studies. He holds a PhD from The University of Western Australia, with earlier degrees including MA and BA.

Research Interests: Dr. De Toni’s work focuses on pragmatics, language and emotion, computational linguistics, and language change. Key projects include the Marie-Sklodowska Curie-funded ELICIT project (analyzing emotional expression in Italian texts) and HEAL'D (investigating emotion in Australian healthcare communication). He collaborates internationally, such as in the BigScience initiative developing large multilingual NLP models.

Projects & Awards: He leads HEAL'D to enhance healthcare communication quality and clinician training. His ELICIT project explores emotional language evolution over 250 years. He received the Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (2020). His work combines corpus-based methods with qualitative studies, addressing healthcare literacy and patient outcomes.

Labs & Collaboration: Collaborations span ANU’s Medical School, School of Allied Health, and UWA’s School of Linguistics. He contributes to interdisciplinary teams advancing health communication and AI-driven language technologies.