My research interests

My research can be divided in five main areas (see my publications for more details):

• Information retrieval (IR). I am interested in both theoretical and practical aspects of IR. From the theoretical-foundational side, I reflect on the notions of information, information need and relevance: is it possible to formally define such concepts and to give a formal cognitive-epistemic framework for IR? How many, and which, types of relevance are there? From the practical side, I am interested in using artificial intelligence techniques to improve the effectiveness of the reformulation phase and to model the task that a user of an information retrieval system has to perform with the retrieved information. I am also interested in the issue of the evaluation of IR systems: I participated in some experiments and I proposed a new measure of IR effectiveness.
  • (in Italian: ascolta un'intervista radiofonica sul Web Information Retrieval)
• Digital libraries and scholarly publishing. I proposed a new model for the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, an electronic scholarly journal in which the standard submission-review-publication process is replaced by an approach based on judgments expressed by the readers. The aim is to demonstrate that it is possible to have a reasonable quality even without peer review. Readersourcing
• Mobile and Wireless devices. Recently, I started to study how to access information with mobile and wireless devices (cell phones, PDAs, ...).
• Philosophical and cognitive aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). I am interested in epistemological problems of AI: I started asking myself questions like "What is knowledge? Information? Data? Meaning?"
• Natural language processing (NLP). I am interested in semantic-pragmatic aspects of NLP (or Computational Linguistics), namely temporal presuppositions (i.e. problems related to the use of the words `before' and `after' in natural language) and counterfactuals (i.e. sentences - or utterances - referring to a non-real course of events). I developed the recursive models, a computational tool for modeling, at a semantic-pragmatic level, utterances containing these linguistic phenomena, and I implemented a computer system that uses the recursive models for interacting in natural language with the user.