Giuseppe Samo
Giuseppe Samo is currently a distinguished professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University. My research focuses on the interactions between formal approaches to language and computational representations in machines.
Publications
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
Samo, G. (2019) A Criterial Approach to the Cartography of V2, John Benjamins Publishing, ISBN 9789027204486.
https://benjamins.com/catalog/la.257
Articles
Giuseppe Samo & Rich Parker (to appear) "Evaluating curated multilingual consumer-facing AI-generated synthetic facilitator companions scenarios for training Emergency Medical Teams in Deep Field Access", in Proceedings of EFMI STC 2026.
Giuseppe Samo & Caterina Bonan (to appear) "Parametric Settings of Cartographic Functional Projections: A diachronic study on French Wh-interrogatives", in The Oxford Handbook of Syntactic Cartography, ed. by Sam Wolfe, Oxford University Press.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2026) "The Semantics of Romance geonyms: Cross-linguistic variation meets context sensitivity", Nature - Humanities and Social Science Communications, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07178-z.
Giuseppe Samo (2026) "A computational cartographic study on the merge nature of Topics in stages of French", Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique. Published online 2026:1-26. doi:10.1017/cnj.2026.10029.
Marco Luchi & Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "Encoding paremias as sets of proverbial markers: a computational study on Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis", Linguistic Vanguard.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (to appear) "Geonimi in italiano: dove la cartografia e la sintassi cartografica si incontrano", in Il nome in Italiano, ed. by L. Lala & E. Castro, Franco Cesati Editore.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "La "techno ambientale" ed il "metallo pesante": anglicismi come nomi di generi e sottogeneri musicali in italiano", in Il nome in Italiano, ed. by L. Lala & E. Castro, Franco Cesati Editore.
Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (to appear), "Comparing Natural and Synthetic Structured Data: A Study of the Passive Verb Alternation in French and Italian", Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE) 2026.
Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (to appear) "Datasets for Verb Alternations across Languages: BLM Templates and Data Augmentation Strategies", Proceedings of SigTurk 2026.
Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (to appear) "Modelling the Morphology of Verbal Paradigms: A Case Study in the Tokenization of Turkish and Hebrew", Proceedings of LREC 2026.
Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "A computational cartographic study on the merge nature of Topics in stages of French", Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique.
Giuseppe Samo & Xing Kang (to appear), "Rethinking the Base-Generation of Non-Arguments in the Left Periphery: Exploring Experimental Evidence from Chinese and Italian", Journal of Linguistics.
Paola Merlo & Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "Generative Computational Modeling", in The Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, ed. by Evelina Leivada and Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Cambridge University Press.
Giuseppe Samo & Xu Chen (to appear) "When Cartography meets Transformers: a study on Syntactic Locality and the functional lexicon in Chinese wh-questions", in Cartographic representations at the interfaces, ed. Si Fuzhen, Luigi Rizzi, Oxford University Press.
Giuseppe Samo (2026) "Adverbs and non-arguments in the left periphery: a computational cartographic study". In Adverbs and particles at the form-meaning interface, ed. Marco Coniglio, Kalle Müller, and Markus Steinbach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Nissim, M., Croce, D., Patti, V., Basile, P., Attanasio, G., Musacchio, E., Rinaldi, M., Borazio, F., Francis, M., Gili, J., Scalena, D., Altuna, B., Azurmendi, E., Basile, V., Bentivogli, L., Bisazza, A., Bolognesi, M., Brunato, D., Caselli, T., Casola, S., Cassese, M., Cettolo, M., Collacciani, C., De Cosmo, L., Di Buono, M. P., Esuli, A., Etxaniz, J., Ferrando, C., Fidelangeli, A., Frenda, S., Fusco, A., Gaido, M., Galassi, A., Galli, F., Giordano, L., Goffetti, M., Gonzalez-Dios, I., Gregori, L., Grundler, G., Iannaccone, S., Jiang, C., La Quatra, M., Lagioia, F., Lo, S. M., Madeddu, M., Magnini, B., Manna, R., Mercorio, F., Merlo, P., Muti, A., Nastase, V., Negri, M., Onorati, D., Palmieri, E., Papi, S., Passaro, L., Pensa, G., Piergentili, A., Potertì, D., Puccetti, G., Ranaldi, F., Ranaldi, L., Ravelli, A. A., Rosola, M., Ruzzetti, E. S., Samo, G., Santilli, A., Santin, P., Sarti, G., Sartor, G., Savoldi, B., Serino, A., Seveso, A., Siciliani, L., Torroni, P., Varvara, R., Zaninello, A., Zanollo, A., Zanzotto, F. M., Zeinalipour, K., & Zugarini, A. (2026). "Challenging the abilities of large language models in Italian: A community initiative", Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics, preprint online available at arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04759
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2025) "Extracting Toponyms from OpenStreetMap and Other Gazetteers: Comparing representational accuracy in multilingual contexts", Nature - Humanities and Social Science Communications, 12, 798 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05025-1.
Vivi Nastase, Giuseppe Samo, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2025), "Multilingual vs. monolingual transformer models in encoding linguistic structure and lexical abstraction", Proceedings of CLIC-IT 2025.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2025), "Generic Geonyms: exploring Wikidata for crosslinguistic prototypical semantics", Journal of Open Humanities.
Giuseppe Samo & Angelapia Massaro (2025), "Syntactic patterns of Italo-Romance CP-layers in Transformers, ChatGPT and Deepseek: two case studies from Romansh and Neapolitan", AI & Linguistica 2(2), 1-22. DOI:10.62408/ai-ling.v2i2.25
Giuseppe Samo (2025), "Cartography, movement and reordering of arguments", The Ziggurat of Grammar, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Giuseppe Samo (2025) "Syntacticization Across Registers, Genres and Modalities: A Crosslinguistic Quantitative Cartographic Study", Generative Grammar in Geneva, vol. 12, 209-223.
Giuseppe Samo & Rich Parker (2025). "Exploring AI-Driven Decisions in Disaster Simulation for Emergency Medical Teams". Studies in health technology and informatics, 328, 151–152. https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI250691
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2025) "Large language models, frame semantics and geodialectal data", in N. Saramandu, M. Nevaci, I. Floarea, I-M. Farca, A. Bojoga, F. R. Constantin, A. Loizo, M. Manta, M. Morcov, O. Niculescu (eds), Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, Edizioni dell'Orso Alessandria, 585-598.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2024). "Dictionnaire et atlas: propriétés lexicales et sémantiques des urbanonymes en français", Onoma 59, 277–303. DOI: 10.34158/ONOMA.59/2024/14
Giuseppe Samo & Elena Isolani (2024) "Comparing Models on the Optionality of Complementizer Omission A Quantitative Computational Study on German and Italo-Romance", Annali di Ca' Foscari. Serie occidentale, 58(58), 287-308.
Giuseppe Samo (2024) "Costruire automaticamente dati sintetici con modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni per comprendere l'apprendimento dell'alternanza verbale causativa in italiano", In Il verbo in Italiano: Morfologia, sintassi, semantica e testualità, ed. Letizia Lala and Enrico Castro, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 227-240.
Vivi Nastase, Giuseppe Samo, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2024) "Exploring Italian Sentence Embeddings Properties through Multi-tasking", Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 10.
Vivi Nastase, Giuseppe Samo, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2024) "Exploring syntactic information in sentence embeddings through multilingual subject-verb agreement", Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 13.
Chunyang Jiang, Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase & Paola Merlo (2024), "BLM-It — Blackbird Language Matrices for Italian: A CALAMITA Challenge", CALAMITA - Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 9.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2024) "The Semantics of generic terms in toponyms: Formal Semantics meets multi-source Big Data", Proceedings of GeoExT 2024: Second International Workshop on Geographic Information Extraction from Texts at ECIR 2024, March 24, Glasgow, Scotland, 1-12.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2024), "Italian Places in Japanese Manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives", Journal of Literary Semantics, 53(1):39-65.
Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (2024) "Distributed computational models of intervention effects: a study on cleft structures in French", in It-Clefts: Empirical and Theoretical Surveys and Advances, ed. by Adam Ledgeway and Caterina Bonan, De Gruyter, 157-180.
Simone Sulpizio, Fritz Günther, Linda Badan, Benjamin Basclain, Marc Brysbaert, Yuen Lai Chan, Laura Anna Ciaccio, Carolin Dudschig, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Fabio Fasoli, Ludovic Ferrand, Dušica Filipović Đurđević, Ernesto Guerra, Geoff Hollis, Remo Job, Khanitin Jornkokgoud, Hasibe Kahraman, Naledi Kgolo-Lotshwao, Sachiko Kinoshita, Julija Kos, Leslie Lee, Nala H. Lee, Ian Grant Mackenzie, Milica Manojlović, Christina Manouilidou, Mirko Martinic, Maria del Carmen Méndez, Ksenija Mišić, Natinee Na Chiangmai, Alexandre Nikolaev, Marina Oganyan, Patrice Rusconi, Giuseppe Samo, Chi-shing Tse, Chris Westbury, Peera Wongupparaj, Melvin J. Yap & Marco Marelli (2024) "Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study", Behavior Research Methods 56, 3794–3813.
Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Testing Cartographic Proposals on Locality Effects in V2: a quantitative study", Journal of Historical Syntax 7 (24), 1-32.
Angelapia Massaro & Giuseppe Samo (2023), "Prompting Metalinguistic Awareness in Large Language Models: ChatGPT and Bias Effects on the Grammar of Italian and Italian Varieties", Verbum 14.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "A Semantic Model for Generic Terms and Place Nouns", Spatial Data Science Symposium 2023 Proceedings, UC Santa Barbara.
Giuseppe Samo & Caterina Bonan (2023) "Health-related content in Transformer-based language models Exploring bias in domain general vs. domain specific training sets, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 302, 743-744. doi: 10.3233/SHTI230252.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Extracting Toponyms from OpenStreetMap: A cross-linguistic perspective", Proceedings of GeoExt '23.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "The Purple Thread: The reception of Prince as a fictional character in graphic narratives", Studies in Comics 13 (1-2), 87 - 113.
Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2023), "Geographical Maps meet Place Names where Languages meet Dialects: The Case of Italian", Forum Italicum, 57(3), 1019-1040.
Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023), "Cyberpunk, steampunk and all that punk: Genre names and their uses across communities", Linguistic Vanguard (9) 3, 317-327.
Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2023), "BLM-s/lE: A structured dataset of English spray-load verb alternations for testing generalization in LLMs", Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Singapore, Association for Computational Linguistics, 12276–12287.
Paola Merlo, Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase & Chunyang Jiang (2023) "Building structured synthetic datasets: The case of Blackbird Language Matrices (BLMs)", proceedings of the Proceedings of the Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2023), 1-11.
Paola Merlo, Chunyang Jiang, Giuseppe Samo & Vivi Nastase (2023) "Blackbird Language Matrices Tasks for Generalization", in Proceedings of the 1st GenBench Workshop on (Benchmarking) Generalisation in NLP, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics, 163–172.
Qin Xie, Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Urbanonyms in Macao", Names: A Journal of Onomastics 71(1):29-43.
Giuseppe Samo, Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Serena Crocchi (2023), "From health to wellness and back to health? Diachronic trends on Italian thermal towns: a quantitative study", in IX Colóquio Internacional Olhares sobre o Envelhecimento (IXCIOSE) 28–29 de novembro de 2022, Trabalhos Selecionados, ed. Aline Bazenga, Celina Martins & Minh Ha Lo-Cicero (Organizadoras), 194-205.
Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Moved to ModP or base-generated in FrameP? A Quantitative Cartographic Study", Revue Roumaine de Linguistique LXVII (4), 345–361.
Boogers, N., Badan, L., Samo, G. & Fiorin G., (2022) "The linear structure of narrative figures in the Saint Francis Cycle: A linguistic analysis" Social Semiotics, 1-34, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2022.2080544.
Ursini, F-A. & Samo, G. (2022) "The Interpretation of Urbanonyms in Discourse Reconciling theoretical accounts with experimental results", Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 58(2), 263-288.
Merlo, P. & Samo, G. (2022) "Exploring T3 Languages with quantitative computational syntax", Theoretical Linguistics, n. 48.
Samo, G. (2022) "Criterial V2: ModP as a locus of microvariation in Swiss Romansh varieties", Probus (34), 143-170.
Ursini, F-A. & Samo, G. (2022) "Names for urban places and conceptual taxonomies: the view from Italian", Spatial Cognition & Computation, DOI: 10.1080/13875868.2021.1954186
Rizzi, L. & Samo, G. (2022) "Introduction: On the role of Romance in cartographic studies", Probus (34), 1-8.
Samo, G. & Si, F. (2022) "Optionality of 的 De in Chinese Possessive Structures: A Quantitative Study". Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 2022, 37-53. https://doi.org/10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-13602.
Samo, G., Bonan, C. & Si, F. (2022) "Health-related content in transformer-based deep neural network language models: exploring cross-linguistic syntactic bias", Studies in health technology and informatics vol. 295 (2022): 221-225.
Samo, G., Zhao, Y., Guasti, M. T., Utunen, H., Stucke, O. & Gamhewage, G. (2022). "Could linguistic complexity be automatically evaluated? A multilingual study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform", Informatics and Technology in Clinical Care and Public Health, J. Mantas et al. (Eds.), 196 - 199.
Samo, G., & Canuti M. (2022) "Note su infiniti flessi in chianino: un approccio cartografico", Annali di Ca' Foscari. Serie occidentale (56), 1-18.
Samo, G. & Ursini F-A., (2022) "Exploring dynamic on-line gazetteers to map variation in the syntax of Italian urbanonyms", Quaderni di Lavoro ASIT 24, 407-423.
Samo, G., Ursini F-A. & Caracciolo G., (2022) "Quantifying formulaic syntax: a quantitative and computational study on temporal complements in Latin subject relatives extracted from the Epigraphic collection of the Catacombs in Chiusi", Annali di Linguistica, Università Orientale, Naples, Italy.
Samo, G., & Caracciolo G. (2022) "Encoding inscriptions as sets of lexical features: a case study on the Epigraphic collection of the Catacombs in Chiusi", Res Antiquae 19, 1-18
Samo, G. & Merlo, P. (2021) "Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax", Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5742
Samo, G. (2021) "N-merge systems in adult and child grammars: a quantitative study on external arguments", Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 7, 103-130. https://doi.org/10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-12005
Zhao, Y., Samo, G., Utunen, H., Stucke, O., & Gamhewage, G. (2021) "Evaluating Complexity of Digital Learning in a Multilingual Context: A Cross-Linguistic Study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform. Studies in Health Technology Informatics 2021 May 27;281:516-517. doi: 10.3233/SHTI210222
Samo, G., & Canuti, M. (2021) "Uncovering the Left Periphery of Etruscan: some theoretical insights", in F. Si and L. Rizzi, Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective, John Benjamins Publishing.
Samo, G, Zhao, Y., & Gamhewage, G.(2020) "Syntactic Complexity of Learning Content in Italian for COVID-19 Frontline Responders: A Study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform", Verbum, 2020, vol. 11, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Verb.15
Samo, G., & Merlo, P. (2019) "Intervention effects in object relatives in English and Italian: a study in quantitative computational syntax", Proceedings of Quasy, Association for Computational Linguistics, 46 - 56. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-7906/
Samo, G. (2019), "Cartography and Microparametric variation: Criterial V2 in Swiss Romansh varieties", Revista Linguítica, v.15.3, 141 -160. https://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2019.v15n3a27546
Samo, G. (2019) "Cartography and Locality in German: a quantitative study with Dependency structures", Rivista di Grammatica Generativa/Research in Generative Grammar, 5, 1-26.
Samo, G. (2018) "Towards a Criterial V2: Some Notes on Subject-initial Clauses", Generative Grammar in Geneva. 2018, vol. 11, 1 - 20. https://doi.org/10.13097/unige:120389
Samo G. (2018). A Criterial approach to the Cartography of V2, PhD dissertation, University of Geneva. https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:108925
Jivanyan, H. & Samo, G. (2017) "Parce-que in the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface", Generative Grammar in Geneva, vol. 10, University of Geneva. doi:10.13097/1tk2-7fja
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