Simone Abbiati is a third-year PhD student in Transcultural studies in the humanities at University of Bergamo, with a “department of Excellence” researcher grant for Digital Humanities. He graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Milan, worked on the narratological category of spatiality in “The Experience of Pain” by C.E. Gadda (BA) and in I. Calvino’s “Cosmicomics” (MA).

He has been a visiting Ph.D. student at Cambridge University (UK) and Stanford University (US). He is an associate researcher at the University of Cambridge's Center for Digital Humanities and a member of SIGHUM, the group of special interests of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) that gathers researchers interested in computational linguistics applications in all aspects of digital humanities, including computational social sciences and computational literary studies.

His current research focuses on fiction that deals with politically sensitive spaces, such as the British-Irish border and the Basque Country. He explores the use of computational linguistics to extract spatial information from English contemporary fiction and testimonies from victims of terror groups (IRA, UDA, ETA, GAL) who have perpetrated violence in those areas. He is also investigating the use of Transformer models for natural language processing tasks to investigate the stylistic variance in spatial expression and terror violence between fiction and actual testimonies.