We are pleased to announce that, as of 1 January 2021, Francesca Frontini will join the CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors. She will take over from Darja Fišer who was responsible for the User Involvement activities in the past four years.
As a board member Francesca will be focusing in particular on the further developing and steering of the Ambassadors programme as well as the CLARIN Café initiative. Furthermore she will be active in the H2020 SSHOC project and involved in activities related to metadata and vocabularies harmonisation.
Says Dr. Francesca Frontini: “I am interested in making the field of language resources and technologies even more adapted for interdisciplinary research by harmonising the way in which we describe, annotate, and analyze them, with the practices of other disciplines, also beyond the SSH domain. In my opinion this has the potential to unlock new knowledge and provide new means for collaborative research.“
With a solid background in Language Resources, Natural Language Processing and a strong interest in raising awareness of CLARIN and encouraging wider participation. Francesca is more than qualified to bring the activities and instruments for stimulating the use of the CLARIN infrastructure to the next level. Her current role as CLARIN Ambassador will come to an end, but the impact of her ambassadorship will remain and the insights gained from it will undoubtedly enrich the perspective of the Board of DIrectors on the potential for reaching out to new audiences and communities of use.
Francesca obtained her PhD from the University of Pavia with a thesis on corpus linguistics. She then joined the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa as a post-doctoral researcher and worked on several European projects with a focus on Computational Lexicography and Natural Language Processing. From 2016 till 2020 she has been maître de conferences (Associate Professor) of Linguistique Informatique at the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier and a member of the Praxiling laboratory. She is currently a researcher at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli", CNR Pisa. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities. She is particularly interested in named entity annotation for digital editions as well as in digital methods for the analysis of literary texts and literary criticism. Together with Carmen Brando she developed REDEN, a tool for Named Entity linking. She is a member of the steering committee of the ADHO Special Interest Group for Digital Literary Stylistics as well as of the Nénufar project which aims to digitise and publish a diachronic corpus of historical editions of the French Dictionary Petit Larousse Illustré.