Paola Velardi

Paola Velardi is a computer scientist who works on natural language processing, ontology learning and machine learning, and she helped develop the OntoLearn ontology-learning system. After a 1978 engineering degree from Sapienza University of Rome, she worked at the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, visited Stanford in 1983, and was a researcher at IBM from 1984 to 1986. She was an associate professor at the Polytechnic University of the Marches from 1986 to 1996, then joined Sapienza's Department of Computer Science in 1996 and became a full professor there in 2001. Her papers include OntoLearn Reloaded in Computational Linguistics in 2013, a 2014 study of Twitter mining for syndromic surveillance, and the 2025 TRADES diffusion model for market simulation, and she received an IBM Faculty Award in 2017. She is a Senior Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the CNR.

Now at: National Research Council and Sapienza University of Rome
Born: 1955
Works: 205
Citations: 4,936
h-index: 35
Badges: Bridge
Boomerang
Wayfarer
Loyal

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1978–1986

Ugo Bordoni, Stanford and IBM

She graduates in electronic engineering from Sapienza University in 1978 and works at the Ugo Bordoni Foundation until 1983. In 1983, she is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where she becomes passionate about artificial intelligence, and from 1984 to 1986 she works as a researcher for IBM.
1986–2001

Professor at Ancona, then Sapienza

From 1986 to 1996, she is an associate professor in the engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of the Marches in Ancona. In November 1996, she joins the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, and in November 2001 she becomes a full professor there.
2002–2004

The OntoLearn system

Her natural language processing work centers on semantic disambiguation and automated ontology learning. In 2002, she coauthors with Roberto Navigli and P. D'Amadio an Information Systems paper on OntoLearn, a system for automatic ontology learning and population from an electronic dictionary. In 2004, she coauthors an evaluation of the OntoLearn ontology learning system with Navigli, Alessandro Cucchiarelli and Francesca Neri at COLING in Geneva.
September 2013

A graph algorithm for taxonomies

She coauthors OntoLearn Reloaded with Stefano Faralli and Roberto Navigli, a graph-based algorithm for taxonomy induction published in Computational Linguistics in September 2013.
2014

Twitter mining for syndromic surveillance

She extracts information from social media for epidemiological monitoring. In 2014, she coauthors "Twitter mining for fine-grained syndromic surveillance" in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.
2017–2019

IBM Faculty Award and Inspiring Fifty

She receives an IBM Faculty Award in March 2017 for her research on recommender systems. In December 2018, she is on Inspiring Fifty's list of the 50 most influential Italian women in science and technology, and in November 2019 she receives the Standout Woman Award International.
2025

Diffusion models for market simulation

In 2025, she coauthors TRADES with Leonardo Berti and Bardh Prenkaj, a transformer-based denoising diffusion model that generates realistic limit order book market simulations, presented at the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025). The team builds DeepMarket, an open-source Python framework for limit order book market simulation with deep learning.
As of October 2026

Senior Associate at CNR-ISTC

She is a Senior Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) of the CNR and a former full professor of computer science at Sapienza University of Rome. Her research has focused on machine learning, text processing, knowledge bases and network analysis.