PhD candidate in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. 

Asya Zanollo graduated in Philosophy at the University of Padua with a thesis on the effects of technology and consumerism on human beings. Her research, titled "Esserci-come-merci: inautenticità, tecnica e consumismo tra Martin Heidegger e Zygmunt Bauman", was conducted under the supervision of Professor Giovanni Gurisatti. 
She later continued her studies at the University of Siena, enrolling in the Master's degree program "Language and Mind: Linguistics and Cognitive Studies," and graduated in April 2024 with a thesis on computational linguistics and psycholinguistics under the supervision of Professors Cristiano Chesi and Vincenzo Moscati. Her work, titled "Linguistics in Crossword: structural analysis and computation", focuses on the syntactic and logical analysis of crossword language and offers a comparative analysis of the processing and solving difficulty of crossword clues between human subjects and language models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). 
Her research interests range from theoretical and experimental syntax, with a particular focus on the structure of copular sentences in crossword puzzles, to computational linguistics, specifically concerning complexity metrics and the psychometric predictive power of LLMs.