Working at the University of Stuttgart’s Department of Teaching and Learning with Intelligent Systems (LLiS), Francesca strives to create more engaging educational experiences. A notable achievement in her academic journey is the development of InteRead, the first publicly available eye-tracking reading dataset containing interruptions.
Francesca Zermiani joined the IMPRS-IS program in 2021, working under the joint supervision of Dr. Maria Wirzberger and Dr. Andreas Bulling. Francesca is driven by her passion for creating more engaging educational experiences. As she puts it, "I am motivated to make education more and more inclusive and fun!"
Francesca’s doctoral research delves into the intricate process of how we refocus on a text after being interrupted while reading. By examining both cognitive and linguistic factors, she aims to uncover the underlying mechanisms that help us regain concentration and comprehension. Her research is not only grounded in theory but also in practical application, as she conducts controlled behavioral lab experiments to explore these phenomena.
A notable achievement in her academic journey is the development of InteRead, the first publicly available eye-tracking reading dataset containing interruptions. Specifically designed to study resumption processes, Francesca recently presented this innovative resource at the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources, and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024). “A key goal of InteRead is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations across educational science, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing (NLP) — a principle which we successfully put into practice during the dataset validation phase”. The paper and dataset are available online (https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.802.pdf, https://osf.io/43j5f/).
She also recently gave a talk at the Interdisciplinary Research Structure for Reading (ERI-Reading) at the University of Valencia, where she shared her insights on individual differences in resumption during interrupted reading (https://www.uv.es/uvweb/interdisciplinary-research-structure-reading/en/news/eri-talk-francesca-zermiani-puzzle-individual-differences-resumption-interrupted-reading-1285923362319/Novetat.html?id=1286376257990). In addition to her research, Francesca served as an IMPRS-IS student representative for the University of Stuttgart site (2022-2023) and volunteered as one of the program’s S4 Workshop organizers. As a student rep, she worked with her colleagues to foster discussion on mental health in academia and implement the IMPRS-IS Social Meet-Ups. With a BA in Language Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a MA in Cognitive Science from Lund University, Francesca has an interdisciplinary academic foundation. Before embarking on her PhD, she honed her research skills as an intern at the Language Development Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
Outside the lab, she expresses her creativity through dance and enjoys teaching, both in university classrooms and in dance studios.
InteRead: An Eye Tracking Dataset of Interrupted Reading presented by Francesca Zermiani at the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources, and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024).
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