Gaia Caligiore

Gaia Caligiore is a contract lecturer at the Department of Humanities, University of Catania, specializing in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and its intersection with computational linguistics and medical communication. She holds a PhD in Interpretation Sciences from University of Catania (2024) and serves as a Junior Research Fellow at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia since 2024.

• Research Interests: Cognitive and socio-semiotic frameworks in LIS, multimodal dataset construction, medical communication, machine translation, treebank development, and bimodal bilingual education.
• Publications: Her recent work focuses on LIS annotation methodologies, medical domain LIS recognition, and educational approaches for deaf signers, with collaborations across Italy and Europe.
• Professional Affiliations: Member of Società di Linguistica Italiana, Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale, Linguistic Society of America, and Gruppo di Studio sulle Politiche Linguistiche.
• International Experience: Completed visiting research at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen), Research trainee at University of Poitiers, and guest researcher at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen).

Academic Contributions span LIS pedagogy, computational annotation, and healthcare communication improvements. Her work addresses both theoretical challenges (sociosemiotic frameworks, dependency parsing) and practical applications (medical LIS datasets, inclusive education).