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Alessandro Soccol

Research Fellow & MSc Student in Artificial Intelligence
University of Cagliari
alessandro.soccol@unica.it


About Me

I am a second year Master’s student in Applied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cagliari, where I also serve as a Research Assistant under Prof. Ludovico Boratto, Dr. Mirko Marras, and Dr. Giacomo Medda. My research focuses on Recommender Systems and Knowledge Graphs.

I have authored four research papers, including two published in top-tier international conferences (ACM CIKM ’25, ACM RecSys ’24), and have mentored one Bachelor’s student on his thesis project. I am also part of the Excellence Program, an honors track reserved for only two top-performing MSc students, and an Lead the Future (LTF) Mentee, a selective mentorship program for outstanding students with an acceptance rate of around 10% (over 2.5k applications). I’ve also been recognized by Forbes as one of the top 100 graduate students in Italy (over 300 applications).

[PhD] I am actively seeking PhD positions in Europe in the areas of Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

Research Interests

Publications

  1. KGGLM A Generative Language Model for Generalizable Knowledge Graph Representation Learning in Recommendation
    Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
    18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys '24), Bari, Italy, 2024.
    PDF Code Late breaking results track (Poster)
  2. hopwise A Python Library for Explainable Recommendation based on Path Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    34th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (ACM CIKM '25), Seoul, South Korea, 2025.
    PDF Code Resource Paper (Poster)
  3. Effective and Transparent Course Recommendation through Causal Reasoning with Language Models
    Afreen Neda, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, and Alessandro Soccol
    15th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR '25), Cagliari, Italy, 2025.
    PDF Short Paper (Oral)
  4. Low-Resource Course Recommendation for Professional Training Associations
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Marongiu Nicolò, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    Workshop on Artificial Intelligence with and for Learning Sciences (WAILS '25), Cagliari, Italy, 2025.
    PDF Short Paper (Oral)
  5. Explainable Recommendations through Path Reasoning over Knowledge Graph with hopwise
    Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Francesca M. Mallocci, Mirko Marras, Giacomo Medda, and Alessandro Soccol
    34th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '26), Gothenburg, Sweden, 2026.
    Code Conference Tutorial (90 minutes, Oral)

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