Team members

Team Leader

Serena Villata (team leader) is Research Director (DR2) at CNRS. She is a research fellow of the Institut 3IA Côte d’Azur since 2019 and the Deputy Scientific Director of the institute since 2021. She is the head of the MARIANNE research team at Inria. In November 2021, she has been awarded with the Prix “Jeunes chercheurs et jeunes chercheuses” from Inria – Académie des Sciences. From 2019 to 2024, she was a nominated member of the National Committee for Digital Ethics. She received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Turin (Italy) in 2010 for her work on computational argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Her research area is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and her current work focuses on computational argumentation, with a specific focus on legal and medical texts, political debates and social network harmful content (abusive language, disinformation). Her work conjugates argument-based reasoning frameworks with natural language arguments extracted from text.

Assistants

  • Delphine Robache (Inria)
  • Lionel Tavanti (I3S)

Permanent Researchers

Elena Cabrio is Full Professor at the University of Côte d’Azur and member of the Inria-I3S research team Marianne. In 2021 she was awarded with a Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence 3IA Côte d’Azur on “AI and Natural Language”. Her main research interests are in NLP, mainly Argumentation Mining, Information Extraction and Hate Speech detection. Goal of her research is to design debating technologies for advanced decision support systems, to support the exchange of information and opinions in different domains (as healthcare and politics), leveraging interdisciplinarity and advances in machine learning for Natural Language Processing.

I am an ISFP researcher (Inria Starting Faculty Position) at the Inria Sophia-Antipolis Centre, since 2023.
My research primarily focuses on argumentation systems, whether abstract, logically structured, or based on natural language text. I am particularly interested in challenges related to knowledge representation, reasoning, explainability, and efficient computation, with the goal of bridging theoretical research and practical applications. This includes both the design of formal models and the development of methods applicable to real-world data. I work on frameworks that can handle uncertainty, incompleteness, temporality, and inconsistency in information.
More broadly, my research areas include: Argumentation, Logic, Knowledge Graphs, Argument Mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Explainability, and Neuro-Symbolic AI.
I am currently working on decoding implicit reasoning, computing similarity between textual arguments, developing explainable methods to predict outcomes such as opinion change or persuasiveness in debates, improving the computational efficiency of argumentation algorithms, and designing new semantics better suited to complex and realistic data.
Dr. Federica Granese holds a Starting Research Position (SRP) at Inria Center at the Université Côte d’Azur, joint with the Defense Security Mission at Inria. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Sorbonne Université – IRD (UMMISCO) in Paris. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from École Polytechnique and Sapienza University. Her research focuses on securing machine learning algorithms with applications in the NLP and medical fields.

Anaïs Ollagnier is Assistant Professor at Université Côte d’Azur since 2024, conducting research at the I3S laboratory (UMR 6070) in Sophia Antipolis, France, as part of the joint Inria-CNRS-UCA MARIANNE team. Her main research interests are on advancing machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), with a particular emphasis on cyberbullying detection and prevention on social media, high-level linguistic analysis, and dialogue modeling.

Postdoctoral Researchers

  • Sofiane Elguendouze (2024–2026)

  • Yingxue Fu (2025–2026)

Yingxue Fu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Marianne team, working with Dr. Anaïs Ollagnier on the automatic detection of cyber aggression. I completed my PhD in 2024, and my thesis investigated the interoperability of discourse annotation frameworks, such as RST and PDTB. My research interests include modeling discourse phenomena, discourse parsing, the automatic processing of other high-level linguistic phenomena, and their application in specific tasks.

PhD Students

  • Luca Baccino (Advisors: D. Torre – GREDEG, S. Villata) — 2021–2024

  • Léonie Blaszyk (Advisors: C. Lequesne – GREDEG, S. Villata) — 2021–2024

  • Greta Damo (Advisors: E. Cabrio, S. Villata) — 2023–2026

Greta Damo is a PhD student specializing in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. She is affiliated with Inria and the 3IA Côte d’Azur institute, where her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in the areas of hate speech detection, counter-speech generation, and argumentation.

Her doctoral research, under the supervision of Professors Elena Cabrio and Serena Villata, involves developing argument-based counter-narratives to combat online hate speech.

I am a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at Université Côte d’Azur, 3IA, Inria, CNRS, and I3S, as part of the Marianne Research Team. My research focuses on countering hate speech through detection, explanation generation, and counter-speech using Machine Learning and NLP. In particular, I study implicit hate speech, analyzing how linguistic phenomena like irony, sentiment, and exaggeration make detection more challenging.

  • Xiaoou Wang (Advisors: S. Villata, E. Cabrio) — 2022–2025

Third-year PhD student particularly interested in computational argumentation: namely Argument Mining and Argument Generation, including also Counter-argument Generation and their applications to the fight against online dis/misinformation.

  • Ekaterina Sviridova (Advisors: E. Cabrio, S. Villata) — 2024–2027

Ekaterina Sviridova is a PhD student in Natural Language Processing, specializing in implicit reasoning in argumentation. My research focuses on unveiling implicit inferences for advanced argument mining. I’m passionate about argumentation theories, enthymemes, and the subtleties of human discourse. My work explores the logic between the lines — where what’s not said says it all. Also a language lover, always curious about how meaning shifts across tongues.

  • Deborah Dore (Advisors: S. Villata, E. Cabrio) — 2024–2027

I am a PhD student in Computer Science with a specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on Argument Mining. My research explores the temporal dynamics and evolution of arguments within political debates.

  • Cyprien Michel-Deletie (Advisors: S. Villata, E. Cabrio) — 2024–2027

I am a PhD student in the team since October 2024. My PhD work is on the analysis of arguments using a combination of logic and of the latest generative language models. I’m very interested in AI in general and especially in ways to enhance it with logic, in a neuro-symbolic fashion. I also wish my research could help fight disinformation and make it easier to extract truth from the wild mess of information spread online.

Research Engineers

  • Theo Alkibiades Collias — 2022–2026

  • Mariana Chaves — 2024–2025

I am a research engineer at CNRS and a member of the MARIANNE team at Inria, where I work on natural language processing (NLP) and argument mining applied to the context of political debates, press articles, and social media. My recent work aims to identify fallacies in media and build graph-based representations to model the argumentative structures of narratives.

Former PhD Students, Postdocs & Engineers

  • Benjamin Molinet, PhD (Advisors: E. Cabrio, S. Villata) — 2021–2024

  • Pierpaolo Goffredo, PhD (Advisors: E. Cabrio, S. Villata) — 2021–2024

  • Cristian Cardellino, Research Engineer — 2023–2024

  • Santiago Marro, PhD (Advisors: E. Cabrio, S. Villata) — 2019–2023

External Collaborators

  • Chris Reed Professor of Computer Science, University of Dundee (UK)
    International Chair, Institut 3IA Côte d’Azur (2025–2029)