Sergio Eugenio Zanotto
Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science,
Project “Varieties of Egalitarianism” Project Website
Emmy Noether Research Group, Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” & Department of Politics and Public Administration
University of Konstanz
My research sits between Linguistics, Political Science and Computer Science, investigating political communication with natural language processing (NLP) methods. I am interested in how declining political accountability shapes citizens’ trust in contemporary Western societies, drawing on both spoken and written political discourse. Methodologically, I focus on developing and evaluating multilingual speech- and text-based NLP models and benchmarks for tasks such as political promise tracking and fact-checking.
- Linguistics
- Political science
- Computer science
Education & career
Positions
- 2026University of KonstanzPostdoctoral Researcher, since 2026. Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.
- 2021University of KonstanzDoctoral Researcher, 2021–2026. Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.
Education
- 2026University of KonstanzPhD in Computational Linguistics at the Graduate School of the Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Konstanz, within the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. Summa cum laude; thesis: Linguistic Characterization of Populism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns.
- 2021University of VeronaMA in General Linguistics.
- 2018University of VeronaBA in Languages and Cultures for Publishing.
Visiting
- 2025Hitotsubashi University, TokyoVisiting Researcher.
- 2024University of Texas at AustinVisiting Researcher.
- 2023University of FlorenceVisiting Researcher.
Grants & fellowships
- 2025University of KonstanzTransition Fellowship (4-month contract), Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.
- 2024University of KonstanzDoctoral Outgoing Fellowship (3,000 €), Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.
- 2021University of VeronaShort-Term Researcher Fellowship (4-month contract), Department of Languages and Literatures.
Service
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Reviewing
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Organising
Publications & code
Peer-reviewed
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Linguistic and Embedding-Based Profiling of Texts Generated by Humans and Large Language Models
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Language Complexity in Populist Rhetoric
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GRIT: A Dataset of Group Reference Recognition in Italian
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Your Stereotypical Mileage May Vary: Practical Challenges of Evaluating Biases in Multiple Languages and Cultural Contexts
Book
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Linguistic Characterization of Populism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns
Preprint
Working papers
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Talking the talk, but not walking the walk: How autocracies commit to shallow norms in global governance
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From ItalExit to Internationalist: How Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Transformed Her Online Rhetoric in Tumultuous Times
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Media Coverage and Party Press Releases in Germany and the UK – Who Follows Whom?
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Populism Goes Global: The Politics of Performing International Solidarity on Twitter by Populist Leaders
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Unveiling Inequality: An Open-ended Survey Approach
Teaching
2024
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Corpus Linguistics with Python
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Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis
2022
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Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis
Conferences, talks & summer schools
Conferences
- 2025SeoulPopulism Goes Global: The Politics of Performing International Solidarity. IPSA World Congress of Political Science. With Giada Pasquettaz.
- 2025ViennaDivided by Design: Unveiling In-Group and Out-Group Dynamics in US and Italian Political Discourse. 7th Annual COMPTEXT Conference, University of Vienna.
- 2024TurinGRIT: A Dataset of Group Reference Recognition in Italian. LREC-COLING 2024.
- 2024KonstanzTypes of Inequality: What matters to Whom. Inequality Conference.
- 2024ViennaLanguage Complexity in Populist Rhetoric. Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences, University of Vienna.
Talks
- 2025TokyoPopulism Goes Global: International Solidarity on Twitter Around Populist Leaders Across Nations. Global Governance Research Seminar, Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Studies (HIAS), Hitotsubashi University.
- 2025KonstanzAnalysis of Populist Communication via Computational Models. Lecture in “Perception of Speaker Characteristics”, Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz.
- 2024KonstanzStatistical Analyses of Populism for Language Complexity. Lecture in “Comparative Populist Politics”, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz.
- 2023RomeWhat’s (the) Right? What’s (the) Left? Identities appeals in Italian Political Discourses. University of Roma III.
- 2023FlorenceMethods on Retrieving Identities appeals in Italian Political Discourses. University of Florence.
- 2022VeronaHedging as a diplomatic tool. University of Verona.
Summer schools
- 2024LisbonLisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS).
- 2022GalwayEuropean Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI).
- 2022FranceSummer School in Annotation, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
Skills
- Class
- Postdoc
- Base
- Konstanz
- From
- Italy
Languages
Programming
- Python
- R
- XML
- HTML
- Stata
- SQL
Solid border: expert. Dashed: proficient.