Federico Ruggeri

• Post-doc research fellow at University of Bologna
• PhD Student at University of Bologna

Current research in machine learning and artificial intelligence is largely centered on modeling and performance evaluation, less so on data collection. However, recent research demonstrated that limitations and biases in data may negatively impact trustworthiness and reliability. These aspects are particularly impactful on sensitive domains such a...

Current research in machine learning and artificial intelligence is largely centered on modeling and performance evaluation, less so on data collection. However, recent research demonstrated that limitations and biases in data may negatively impact trustworthiness and reliability. These aspects are particularly impactful on sensitive domains such a...

A popular end-to-end architecture for selective rationalization is the select-then-predict pipeline, comprising a generator to extract highlights fed to a predictor. Such a cooperative system suffers from suboptimal equilibrium minima due to the dominance of one of the two modules, a phenomenon known as interlocking. While several contributions aim...

Hate speech relies heavily on cultural influences, leading to varying individual interpretations. For that reason, we propose a Semantic Componential Analysis (SCA) framework for a cross-cultural and cross-domain analysis of hate speech definitions. We create the first dataset of definitions derived from five domains: online dictionaries, research...

We propose misogyny detection as an Argumentative Reasoning task and we investigate the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to understand the implicit reasoning used to convey misogyny in both Italian and English. The central aim is to generate the missing reasoning link between a message and the implied meanings encoding the misogyny. Our stu...

We introduce the Guideline-Centered annotation process, a novel data annotation methodology focused on reporting the annotation guidelines associated with each data sample. We identify three main limitations of the standard prescriptive annotation process and describe how the Guideline-Centered methodology overcomes them by reducing the loss of inf...

We develop novel annotation guidelines for sentence-level subjectivity detection, which are not limited to language-specific cues. We use our guidelines to collect NewsSD-ENG, a corpus of 638 objective and 411 subjective sentences extracted from English news articles on controversial topics. Our corpus paves the way for subjectivity detection in En...

The first five editions of the CheckThat! lab focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. Since the 2023 edition, it has been focusing on new problems that can support the research and decision making during the verification process. In this new edition, we...

Disruptive situations are emotionally-charged events diverging from ordinary behavior, like people fighting or screaming. Public transports are one type of social environment where disruptive situation may occur, and their timely detection may bring significant improvements to people's safety. Current approaches to disruptive situation detection, t...

Misogyny is often expressed through figurative language. Some neutral words can assume a negative connotation when functioning as pejorative epithets. Disambiguating the meaning of such terms might help the detection of misogyny. In order to address such task, we present PejorativITy, a novel corpus of 1,200 manually annotated Italian tweets for pe...

Fashion e-commerce platforms are becoming increasingly popular. However, scanning, rendering, and captioning fashion items are still done mostly manually. In this work, we address the task of generating a textual description of a fashion item from an image portraying it. We carry out an extensive study with several neural architectures based on Inc...

We describe the sixth edition of the CheckThat! lab, part of the 2023 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The five previous editions of CheckThat! focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, verifying whether a claim was fact-checked before, supporting evidence retrieval, and claim verificat...

We develop novel annotation guidelines for sentence-level subjectivity detection, which are not limited to language-specific cues. We use our guidelines to collect NewsSD-ENG, a corpus of 638 objective and 411 subjective sentences extracted from English news articles on controversial topics. Our corpus paves the way for subjectivity detection in En...

Defining subjectivity indicators without relying on domain-specific assumptions or incurring interpretation biases is a well-known challenge. To account for these limitations, recent work is shifting toward annotation procedures for subjectivity detection that are not limited to language-specific cues. Nonetheless, developing a rigorous methodology...

The five editions of the CheckThat! lab so far have focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. The 2023 edition of the lab zooms into some of the problems and—for the first time—it offers five tasks in seven languages (Arabic, Dutch, English, German, Italia...

Many NLP applications require models to be interpretable. However, many successful neural architectures, including transformers, still lack effective interpretation methods. A possible solution could rely on building explanations from domain knowledge, which is often available as plain, natural language text. We thus propose an extension to transfo...

This study aims at predicting the outcomes of legal cases based on the textual content of judicial decisions. We present a new corpus of Italian documents, consisting of 226 annotated decisions on Value Added Tax by Regional Tax law commissions. We address the task of predicting whether a request is upheld or rejected in the final decision. We empl...

Creating balanced labeled textual corpora for complex tasks, like legal analysis, is a challenging and expensive process that often requires the collaboration of domain experts. To address this problem, we propose a data augmentation method based on the combination of GloVe word embeddings and the WordNet ontology. We present an example of applicat...

Cryptocurrencies have gained enormous momentum in finance and are nowadays commonly adopted as a medium of exchange for online payments. After recent events during which GameStop's stocks were believed to be influenced by WallStreetBets subReddit, Reddit has become a very hot topic on the cryptocurrency market. The influence of public opinions on c...

The successful application of argument mining in the legal domain can dramatically impact many disciplines related to law. For this purpose, we present Demosthenes, a novel corpus for argument mining in legal documents, composed of 40 decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union on matters of fiscal state aid. The annotation specifies th...

We propose a study on multimodal argument mining in the domain of political debates. We collate and extend existing corpora and provide an initial empirical study on multimodal architectures, with a special emphasis on input encoding methods. Our results provide interesting indications about future directions in this important domain.

AMICA is an argument mining-based search engine, specifically designed for the analysis of scientific literature related to Covid-19. AMICA retrieves scientific papers based on matching keywords and ranks the results based on the papers' argumentative content. An experimental evaluation conducted on a case study in collaboration with the Italian Na...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the scientific community to share timely evidence, also in the form of pre-printed papers, not peer reviewed yet. Purpose To develop an artificial intelligence system for the analysis of the scientific literature by leveraging on recent developments in the field of Argument Mining. Methodology Scientific...

Constrained decision problems in the real world are subject to uncertainty. If predictive information about the stochastic elements is available offline, recent works have shown that it is possible to rely on an (expensive) parameter tuning phase to improve the behavior of a simple online solver so that it roughly matches the solution quality of an...

Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus c...

The applications of conversational agents for scientific disciplines (as expert domains) are understudied due to the lack of dialogue data to train such agents. While most data collection frameworks, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, foster data collection for generic domains by connecting crowd workers and task designers, these frameworks are not mu...

We present SubjectivITA: the first Italian corpus for subjectivity detection on news articles, with annotations at sentence and document level. Our corpus consists of 103 articles extracted from online newspapers, amounting to 1,841 sentences. We also define baselines for sentence-and document-level subjectivity detection using transformer-based an...

We propose a novel architecture for Graph Neural Networks that is inspired by the idea behind Tree Kernels of measuring similarity between trees by taking into account their common substructures, named fragments. By imposing a series of regularization constraints to the learning problem, we exploit a pooling mechanism that incorporates such notion...

Transformers changed modern NLP in many ways. However, they can hardly exploit domain knowledge, and like other blackbox models, they lack interpretability. Unfortunately, structured knowledge injection, in the long run, risks to suffer from a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We thus propose a memory enhancement of transformer models that makes us...

This paper presents the latest developments of the use of memory network models in detecting and explaining unfair terms in on-line consumer contracts. We extend the CLAUDETTE tool for the detection of potentially unfair clauses in online Terms of Service, by providing to the users the explanations of unfairness (legal rationales) for five differen...

Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus c...

Consumer contracts often contain unfair clauses, in apparent violation of the relevant legislation. In this paper we present a new methodology for evaluating such clauses in online Terms of Services. We expand a set of tagged documents (terms of service), with a structured corpus where unfair clauses are liked to a knowledge base of rationales for...