Portrait of Alberto Testoni

Dr. Alberto Testoni

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Responsible NLP and ML for Healthcare (CaRe-NLP project) at Amsterdam UMC, part of the NLP4Health Lab led by prof. Iacer Calixto. My research focuses on making generative AI models more reliable, with a specific focus on uncertainty estimation, calibration, and safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare. Before joining Amsterdam UMC, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam, working with Raquel Fernández on evaluating and improving the multimodal and interactive capabilities of LLMs. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Trento (supervised by Raffaella Bernardi), an MSc in Cognitive Science from CIMeC, University of Trento, and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Bologna.

Recent publications

All publications
  • Testoni, A., Calixto, I., Mind the Gap: Benchmarking LLM Uncertainty and Calibration with Specialty-Aware Clinical QA and Reasoning-Based Behavioural Features. (Outstanding Paper Award) Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), EACL 2026. Paper
  • Testoni, A., Plank, B., Fernández, R., RAcQUEt: Unveiling the Dangers of Overlooked Referential Ambiguity in Visual LLMs. Proceedings of The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 Paper
  • Horst, N., Mazzaccara, D., Schmidt, A., Sullivan, M., Momentè, F., Franceschetti, L., Sadler, P., Hakimov, S., Testoni, A., Bernardi, R., Fernández, R., Koller, A., Lemon, O., Schlangen, D., Giulianelli, M., Suglia, A., Playpen: An Environment for Exploring Learning Through Conversational Interaction. Proceedings of The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 Paper

News

  • March 2026: We received an Outstanding Paper Award at EACL 2026!
  • January 2026: New paper accepted at EACL 2026!
  • August 2025: Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025!
  • June 2025: New preprint on uncertainty and calibration in medical QA!
  • May 2025: Two papers accepted at ACL 2025!
  • February 2025: New preprint available on evaluating LLMs in Multi-Session Interactions!
  • December 2024: I joined the Deptartment of Medical Informatics at Amsterdam UMC as a Postdoctoral Researcher!
  • December 2024: New preprint available on Referential Ambiguity in VQA.
  • June 2024: Two new preprints available! (one paper appearing at EMNLP 2024)
  • May 2024: Two papers accepted at ACL 2024!
  • February-May 2024: I served as Area Chair for ACL 2024 and LREC-COLING 2024.
  • April-May 2024: Teaching assistant of the course Advanced Topics in Computational Semantics (UvA).
  • February 2024: New paper accepted at EACL 2024!
  • December 2023: New paper out in Cognitive Science!
  • November 2023: Invited talk at MPI - Nijmegen
  • Oct-Dec 2023: Guest lectures at UvA (Higher Cognitive Functions and NLP1)
  • April 2023: A discussion about my PhD thesis is featured in the Computer Vision News magazine (pages 12-13)
  • February 2023: I defended my PhD thesis and joined UvA-ILLC as a Postdoc!
  • October 2022: New paper accepted at NL4AI @ AI*IA!
  • September 2022: New papers accepted at COLING and (Dis)embodiment!
  • June 2022: New paper accepted at IJCOL!
  • June 2022: New paper accepted at INLG 2022!
  • April 2022: I started an internship at Amazon Alexa AI in Berlin.
  • January 2022: New paper out in Frontiers in Big Data!
  • August 2021: Check our new EMNLP 2021 paper!
  • July 2021: Check our new ACL-SRW and SpLU-RoboNLP papers!
  • March 2021: We got a Special Mention @ CLIC-it!
  • January 2021: Paper acceapted at EACL2021!
  • September 2020: Check out our latest publications (ALVR, SpLU, AI*IA, CLIC-it).
  • September 2019: I started my Ph.D.
  • July 2019: I got my Ms.C. in Cognitive Science.
  • July 2019: one paper accepted at SemDial2019.
  • February 2019: one paper accepted at CMCL2019 co-located with NAACL.

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