I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University. My research focuses on the areas of Applied Data Science and Text Mining. From 2018 until July 2020 I was a postdoc fellow at the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) working on the topic of fake news detection on social media funded by Swiss National Foundation (SNF). I received my Ph.D. from the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, in Switzerland where I was a member of the Information Retrieval group working on the topic of tracking sentiment over time.
I am particularly interested in research topics of Natural Language Processing, Social Media Analysis and Computational Social Science. My current research focuses on quantifying different types of social biases (e.g., towards gender roles and race) that exist in online text and measure their association with users’ survey responses. The biases are measured based on similarity measures among words which are modelled with distributional representations. Other research interests include text mining in surveys, fake news detection, bot detection, fact checking, and sentiment analysis.