Massimo Marelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 1433271 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Massimo Marelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Massimo |
| FAMILY NAME | Marelli |
| SIGNATURE | MARELLI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milano-Bicocca |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5831-5441 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Morphemes in the wild: Modelling affix learning from the noisy landscape of natural text
Knowing a translation pair by the cross-linguistic company it keeps: Cross-linguistic context consistency shapes semantic overlap in bilingual conceptual representation
Visual search and real-image similarity: An empirical assessment through the lens of deep learning
The ability to predict how efficiently a person finds an object in the environment is a crucial goal of attention research. Central to this issue are the similarity principles initially proposed by Duncan and Humphreys, which outline how the similarity between target and distractor objects (TD) and between distractor objects themselves (DD) affect search efficiency. However, the search principles lack direct quantitative support from an ecologica…
False memories from nowhere: Humans falsely recognize words that are not attested in their vocabulary
Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. Indeed, in this experimental paradigm, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens in cases in which no apparent prior semantic knowledge is available, like in the case of entirely nov…
Cracking arbitrariness: A data-driven study of auditory iconicity in spoken English
Auditory iconic words display a phonological profile that imitates their referents’ sounds. Traditionally, those words are thought to constitute a minor portion of the auditory lexicon. In this article, we challenge this assumption by assessing the pervasiveness of onomatopoeia in the English auditory vocabulary through a novel data-driven procedure. We embed spoken words and natural sounds into a shared auditory space through (a) a short-time Fo…
Visual experience modulates the sensitivity to the distributional history of words in natural language
Different experiential traces (i.e., linguistic, motor, and perceptual) are likely contributing to the organization of human semantic knowledge. Here, we aimed to address this issue by investigating whether visual experience may affect the sensitivity to distributional priors from natural language. We conducted an independent reanalysis of data from Bottini et al., in which early blind and sighted participants performed an auditory lexical decisi…
Compositional processing in the recognition of Chinese compounds: Behavioural and computational studies
Recent research has shown that the compositional meaning of a compound is routinely constructed by combining meanings of constituents. However, this body of research has focused primarily on Germanic languages. It remains unclear whether this same computational process is also observed in Chinese, a writing system characterised by less systematicity of the meanings and functions of constituents across compounds. We quantified the ease of integrat…
Inviolability in the digital era: The ICRC’s Agreement on Privileges and Immunities with Luxembourg
As the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other international organizations (IOs) are undergoing significant digital transformation and operate in an increasingly digitalized environment, questions as to how they can continue to ensure their information security are becoming more acute. Legal tools to protect IOs from harm in the digital age are central in this regard, alongside technical and organizational measures. This article…
High variability in LLMs’ analogical reasoning
Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings
Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT‐base and Llama‐2‐13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into cons…
A distributional model of concepts grounded in the spatial organization of objects
Data-driven models of concepts are gaining popularity in Psychology and Cognitive Science. Distributional semantic models represent word meanings as abstract word co-occurrence patterns, and excel at capturing human meaning intuitions about conceptual relationships; however, they lack the explicit links to the physical world that humans acquire through perception. Computer vision neural networks, on the other hand, can produce representations of …
Measuring the semantic priming effect across many languages
Decomposing geographical judgments into spatial, temporal and linguistic components
When mentally exploring maps representing large-scale environments (e.g., countries or continents), humans are assumed to mainly rely on spatial information derived from direct perceptual experience (e.g., prior visual experience with the geographical map itself). In the present study, we rather tested whether also temporal and linguistic information could account for the way humans explore and ultimately represent this type of maps. We quantifie…
On humans' (explicit) intuitions about the meaning of novel words
Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action
This handbook is a foundational text which offers a comprehensive, accessible analysis of personal data protection law, and its significance to humanitarian organizations. Bringing together years of research on personal data protection principles, it outlines how humanitarian organizations can use these principles to uphold the rights and dignity of the most vulnerable. Reflecting the rapid evolution of new technologies, the handbook provides an …
Surfing the Ocean: The machine learning psycholexical approach 2.0 to detect personality traits in texts
OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop a machine learning model to infer OCEAN traits from text. BACKGROUND: The psycholexical approach allows retrieving information about personality traits from human language. However, it has rarely been applied because of methodological and practical issues that current computational advancements could overcome. METHOD: Classical taxonomies and a large Yelp corpus were leveraged to learn an embedding for each personal…
Meaning Beyond Lexicality: Capturing Pseudoword Definitions with Language Models
Pseudowords such as “knackets” or “spechy”—letter strings that are consistent with the orthotactical rules of a language but do not appear in its lexicon—are traditionally considered to be meaningless, and used as such in empirical studies. However, recent studies that show specific semantic patterns associated with these words as well as semantic effects on human pseudoword processing have cast doubt on this view. While these studies suggest tha…
Rethinking First Language-Second Language Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights From the ENglish Reading Online (Enro) Project
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate hi…
Prediction at the intersection of sentence context and word form: Evidence from eye-movements and self-paced reading
A key issue in language processing is how we recognize and understand words in sentences. Research on sentence reading indicates that the time we need to read a word depends on how (un)expected it is. Research on single word recognition shows that each word also has its own recognition dynamics based on the relation between its orthographic form and its meaning. It is not clear, however, how these sentence-level and word-level dynamics interact. …
Hands-on false memories: A combined study with distributional semantics and mouse-tracking
Although mouse-tracking has been seen as a real-time window into different aspects of human decision-making processes, currently little is known about how the decision process unfolds in veridical and false memory retrieval. Here, we directly investigated decision-making processes by predicting participants’ performance in a mouse-tracking version of a typical Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task through distributional semantic models, a usage-bas…
Text reading in English as a second language: Evidence from the Multilingual Eye-Movements Corpus
Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich behavioral eye-tracking record of text reading in English as an L2 among 543 university student speake…
Form to meaning mapping and the impact of explicit morpheme combination in novel word processing
In the present study, we leveraged computational methods to explore the extent to which, relative to direct access to semantics from orthographic cues, the additional appreciation of morphological cues is advantageous while inducing the meaning of affixed pseudo-words. We re-analyzed data from a study on a lexical decision task for affixed pseudo-words. We considered a parsimonious model only including semantic variables (namely, semantic neighbo…
Data-driven Cross-lingual Syntax: An Agreement Study with Massively Multilingual Models
Massively multilingual models such as mBERT and XLM-R are increasingly valued in Natural Language Processing research and applications, due to their ability to tackle the uneven distribution of resources available for different languages. The models’ ability to process multiple languages relying on a shared set of parameters raises the question of whether the grammatical knowledge they extracted during pre-training can be considered as a data-dri…
Caoss and transcendence: Modeling role-dependent constituent meanings in compounds
Many theories on the role of semantics in morphological representation and processing focus on the interplay between the lexicalized meaning of the complex word on the one hand, and the individual constituent meanings on the other hand. However, the constituent meaning representations at play do not necessarily correspond to the free-word meanings of the constituents: Role-dependent constituent meanings can be subject to sometimes substantial sem…
Digitisation and Sovereignty in Humanitarian Space: Technologies, Territories and Tensions
Debates are ongoing on the limits of - and possibilities for - sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, v…
Digitisation and Sovereignty in Humanitarian Space: Technologies, Territories and Tensions
Debates are ongoing on the limits of - and possibilities for - sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, v…
The SolarWinds hack: Lessons for international humanitarian organizations
As humanitarian organizations become more active in the digital domain and reliant upon new technologies, they evolve from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace, able to build on the advantages of new technologies but also vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that can impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or other situations of violence. The recent hack of the International Red Cros…
Rethinking First Language-Second Language Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights From the ENglish Reading Online (Enro) Project
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate hi…
Data-driven Cross-lingual Syntax: An Agreement Study with Massively Multilingual Models
Massively multilingual models such as mBERT and XLM-R are increasingly valued in Natural Language Processing research and applications, due to their ability to tackle the uneven distribution of resources available for different languages. The models’ ability to process multiple languages relying on a shared set of parameters raises the question of whether the grammatical knowledge they extracted during pre-training can be considered as a data-dri…
Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the gramm…
Hacking humanitarians: Defining the cyber perimeter and developing a cyber security strategy for international humanitarian organizations in digital transformation
Digitalization and new technologies have an increasingly important role in today's humanitarian activities. As humanitarian organizations become more active in and reliant on new and digital technologies, they evolve from being simple bystanders to being fully fledged stakeholders in cyberspace, vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that could impact on their capacity to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or other situations of…
Autonomy level and quality of everyday experience of people with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia
In the health domain, well-being is primarily assessed as autonomy and mental distress, whereas the quality of daily experience is rarely investigated. In this study, the relationship between autonomy levels and daily experience was explored. Thirty-five Italian adults with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia provided for one week real-time descriptions of daily activities and associated experiences through the Experience Sampling Method procedure. Par…
An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning.
A 2-layer symbolic network model based on the equilibrium equations of the Rescorla-Wagner model (Danks, 2003) is proposed. The study first presents 2 experiments in Serbian, which reveal for sentential reading the inflectional paradigmatic effects previously observed by Milin, Filipović Đurđević, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009) for unprimed lexical decision. The empirical results are successfully modeled without having to assume separate rep…
Integration of base rates and new information in an abstract hypothesis‐testing task
In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0–4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the experimenter had drawn. Base rate…
The only one strategy in context
No Delay for Some Inferences
We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect …
External syntax and the Cumulative Effect in subject sub-extraction: An experimental evaluation
In this paper, we test the Cumulative Effect proposed by (Haegeman et al. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
Vector-Space Models of Semantic Representation From a Cognitive Perspective: A Discussion of Common Misconceptions
Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despit…
Autonomy level and quality of everyday experience of people with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia
In the health domain, well-being is primarily assessed as autonomy and mental distress, whereas the quality of daily experience is rarely investigated. In this study, the relationship between autonomy levels and daily experience was explored. Thirty-five Italian adults with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia provided for one week real-time descriptions of daily activities and associated experiences through the Experience Sampling Method procedure. Par…
Semantic transparency is not invisibility: A computational model of perceptually-grounded conceptual combination in word processing
Hacking humanitarians: Defining the cyber perimeter and developing a cyber security strategy for international humanitarian organizations in digital transformation
Digitalization and new technologies have an increasingly important role in today's humanitarian activities. As humanitarian organizations become more active in and reliant on new and digital technologies, they evolve from being simple bystanders to being fully fledged stakeholders in cyberspace, vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that could impact on their capacity to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or other situations of…
Data-driven computational models reveal perceptual simulation in word processing
Mechanisms for handling nested dependencies in neural-network language models and humans
Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience
English spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers' sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this…
Toward a unified account of nonsymbolic and symbolic representations of number: Insights from a combined psychophysical-computational approach
Images of the unseen: Extrapolating visual representations for abstract and concrete words in a data-driven computational model
Theories of grounded cognition assume that conceptual representations are grounded in sensorimotor experience. However, abstract concepts such as jealousy or childhood have no directly associated referents with which such sensorimotor experience can be made; therefore, the grounding of abstract concepts has long been a topic of debate. Here, we propose (a) that systematic relations exist between semantic representations learned from language on t…
Patterns in Caoss: Distributed representations predict variation in relational interpretations for familiar and novel compound words
The SolarWinds hack: Lessons for international humanitarian organizations
As humanitarian organizations become more active in the digital domain and reliant upon new technologies, they evolve from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace, able to build on the advantages of new technologies but also vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that can impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by armed conflict or other situations of violence. The recent hack of the International Red Cros…
Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders
People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the gramm…
Prediction at the intersection of sentence context and word form: Evidence from eye-movements and self-paced reading
A key issue in language processing is how we recognize and understand words in sentences. Research on sentence reading indicates that the time we need to read a word depends on how (un)expected it is. Research on single word recognition shows that each word also has its own recognition dynamics based on the relation between its orthographic form and its meaning. It is not clear, however, how these sentence-level and word-level dynamics interact. …
Hands-on false memories: A combined study with distributional semantics and mouse-tracking
Although mouse-tracking has been seen as a real-time window into different aspects of human decision-making processes, currently little is known about how the decision process unfolds in veridical and false memory retrieval. Here, we directly investigated decision-making processes by predicting participants’ performance in a mouse-tracking version of a typical Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task through distributional semantic models, a usage-bas…
Text reading in English as a second language: Evidence from the Multilingual Eye-Movements Corpus
Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich behavioral eye-tracking record of text reading in English as an L2 among 543 university student speake…
Form to meaning mapping and the impact of explicit morpheme combination in novel word processing
In the present study, we leveraged computational methods to explore the extent to which, relative to direct access to semantics from orthographic cues, the additional appreciation of morphological cues is advantageous while inducing the meaning of affixed pseudo-words. We re-analyzed data from a study on a lexical decision task for affixed pseudo-words. We considered a parsimonious model only including semantic variables (namely, semantic neighbo…
Data-driven Cross-lingual Syntax: An Agreement Study with Massively Multilingual Models
Massively multilingual models such as mBERT and XLM-R are increasingly valued in Natural Language Processing research and applications, due to their ability to tackle the uneven distribution of resources available for different languages. The models’ ability to process multiple languages relying on a shared set of parameters raises the question of whether the grammatical knowledge they extracted during pre-training can be considered as a data-dri…
Caoss and transcendence: Modeling role-dependent constituent meanings in compounds
Many theories on the role of semantics in morphological representation and processing focus on the interplay between the lexicalized meaning of the complex word on the one hand, and the individual constituent meanings on the other hand. However, the constituent meaning representations at play do not necessarily correspond to the free-word meanings of the constituents: Role-dependent constituent meanings can be subject to sometimes substantial sem…
Digitisation and Sovereignty in Humanitarian Space: Technologies, Territories and Tensions
Debates are ongoing on the limits of - and possibilities for - sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, v…
Decomposing geographical judgments into spatial, temporal and linguistic components
When mentally exploring maps representing large-scale environments (e.g., countries or continents), humans are assumed to mainly rely on spatial information derived from direct perceptual experience (e.g., prior visual experience with the geographical map itself). In the present study, we rather tested whether also temporal and linguistic information could account for the way humans explore and ultimately represent this type of maps. We quantifie…
Computer Science (33 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Natural language processing (21 works) · Artificial Intelligence (19 works) · Cognition (14 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (14 works) · Cognitive science (9 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (9 works)