Simona Frenda

Research interests

I am a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University and co-founder of the startup aequa-tech. I obtained a PhD in a co-supervised programme between the University of Turin and the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Computer Science in 2022, with an awarded thesis that examines implicit manifestations of abusive language against women, migrants, and cultural minorities in a multilingual setting, paying particular attention to the role of humour. My research focuses on investigating and creating AI for the well-being of our community: i) moderating hate speech online, ii) empowering people with pedagogical technologies to distinguish fake news and utilise gender-inclusive language, and iii) implementing and evaluating models aware of diverse human viewpoints on the same phenomenon. I am also co-organiser of various shared tasks such as IronITA 2018, HaSpeeDe 2020 and EMit 2023 at EVALITA, DETESTS-Dis 2024 at IberLEF, GFG 2024 at CALAMITA, and POLAR 2025 at SemEval, and several editions of the NLPerspectives workshop at ECAI 2023, LREC 2024 and EMNLP 2025.