About me

I am a PhD student at the University of Groningen, where I am part of the Computational Linguistics group. My research has focused on natural language processing (NLP) and computational argumentation applied to the context of political debates, press articles, and social media. Before my current role, I was a I am a research engineer at CNRS and a member of the MARIANNE team at Inria. In my 8 years of working experience, I have developed diverse projects involving statistics, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This includes applications in social media analysis, gender representation in media, explainable AI, supply chain logistics, and money laundering detection.

Key words about me: Natural Language Processing (NLP) Argument Mining Computational Linguistics (Large) Language Models Data Science Fallacious arguments Corpora Creation Explainable AI Statistics Machine Learning

Work experience

Research

PHD CANDIDATE University of Groningen, Netherlands | February 2026 - Present

My PhD research focuses on the development of NLP and argument mining techniques for detecting, countering, and reducing climate misinformation and polarization in social media.

RESEARCH ENGINEER CNRS and Inria, France | April 2023 - August 2025

Conducted research in NLP and computational argumentation, focused on fallacy detection and argument mining within political debates and social media contexts. Key contributions include the creation and annotation of corpora, manipulation of transformer-based models, and developing graph-based representations of argument structures.

INTERNSHIP I3S laboratory and INRIA, France | March 2022 - August 2022 August 2022

Research on prototype-based interpretable neural networks, text classification models, and NLP techniques applied to the understanding of gender representation in visual media.

Read the full work here.

INTERNSHIP Université Côte d’Azur and INRIA, France | April 2021 - July 2021

Research on model agnostic interpretability methods in the ambit of images. More specifically, improving resampling process for local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME).

Read the full work here.

Industry

JUNIOR DATA SCIENTIST Walmart Supply Chain Analytics USA, Costa Rica | October 2018 - July 2020

Directed and developed data analysis projects. The main initiatives included anomaly detection systems, statistical sampling design, statistical process control techniques, and KPI development.

DATA ANALYST BAC Credomatic Regional Compliance Management, Costa Rica | April 2016 - December 2016

Developed a money laundering detection system based on bayesian decision trees models applied on banking transactional data.

Education

MSc DATA SCIENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Université Côte d’Azur, France | 2020 - 2022 Honors Graduate (Mention Très Bien)

BACHELOR IN STATISTICS University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica | 2013 - 2017 Honors Graduate

Awards

Highest GPA among Statistics majors for three consecutive years : 2013, 2014, 2015. UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA

Honorable Mention: 9th place (out of ≈33 000) on National Admission Exam. UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA 2012-2013

Honorable Mention: 1st place (out of ≈20 000) on national Admission Exam. TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF COSTA RICA 2012-2013

Scholarships

IDEX Scholarship of Academic Excellence 2020-2021 UNIVERSITÉ CÔTE D’AZUR

Academic Excellence Scholarship 2013-2017 UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA

Publications

Chaves, M., Cabrio, E., & Villata, S. (2025, March). FALCON: A multi-label graph-based dataset for fallacy classification in the COVID-19 infodemic. SAC ’25 - ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing. https://doi.org/10.1145/3672608.3707913

Goffredo, P., Chaves, M., Villata, S., & Cabrio, E. (2023). Argument-based Detection and Classification of Fallacies in Political Debates. In H. Bouamor, J. Pino, & K. Bali (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 11101–11112). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.684

Languages

• English C1
• Spanish C2 - Native
• Portuguese B2/C1
• French B2

Main skills

python R LaTeX SQL

Conferences Reviewed

List of conferences where I have served as a reviewer:

• SAC 2025 (ACM Symposium on Applied Computing)
• LREC-COLING 2024 (Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation)