As part of my PhD journey, I had the opportunity to visit the well-known NLP lab at University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom through the SoBigData++ Transnational Access (TNA) program. This experience was not only inspiring for my research but also enriching on a personal and professional level. In this post, I aim to share insights about my TNA experience and  the research I conducted between October and December.

The SoBigData++ TNA program facilitates young researchers like me to collaborate with leading institutions across Europe. It offers a unique chance to work with experts in various fields—in my case, the NLP area. My visit to the University of Sheffield provided a broader perspective on academia around the world. I joined several activities organized by the host institution, including reading groups, debates about hot topics in NLP, and seminars held by well-known researchers, thanks to the network of Sheffield researchers.

Specifically, during my visit, I worked on in-context learning using state-of-the-art open-source LLMs to test their effectiveness in representing multiple perspectives with respect to fine-tuning. These perspectives were derived from a collection of diverse annotations provided by people with varied life experiences and backgrounds. From our preliminary analysis, we found that LLMs tend to outperform in terms of performance when predicting aggregated labels.

The research involved the usage of perspectivist datasets, incorporating different opinions, which are freely available to the community, as well as self-curated datasets from my home institutions, UNIPI and SNS. We utilized new prompting approaches, such as chain-of-thought to enhance the reasoning capabilities of the LLMs, role-playing (asking the LLMs to act as specific characters), and continuum learning—which involves providing the models with examples ranging from the simplest to the most difficult.

Collaborating with the local researchers was inspiring and provided valuable insights for the plans already established for the following PhD years. I gained a lot of inspiration and new ideas during my visit.