Pia Pachinger

she / her

I'm a fourth year PhD student currently interested in perspectivism and human label variation in Natural Language Processing, social bias in NLP, low-resource language varieties and domains, data resource creation, and domain-specific information extraction. 

I love all areas of NLP, from foundations to application. Please reach out to me if you want to discuss!

Contact me by reordering    @    tuwien.ac.at    pia.pachinger

An AI Reading of the Library of Babel
Simón López Trujillo*, Pia Pachinger*, Baltazar Pérez* 

2023 EACL C3NLP 
Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments
Pia Pachinger, Anna Maria Planitzer, Julia Neidhardt, Allan Hanbury

We find that researchers studying harmful language online treat abusiveness, offensiveness, and toxicity interchangeably as sub-concept of one another. While social science literature frequently employs incivility with similar meaning, computer science research underutilizes this term, suggesting both fields would benefit from terminological unification. We compile and analyse the distinct definitions researchers use for these concepts to facilitate future unification efforts across and within disciplines.

Counts of terms used to describe toxicity, offensiveness and incivility i​n different papers on content moderation across disciplines

Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (ACL) 2025
Alignment by Disagreement? Toward Investigating LLMs' Adaptation to Personal and Sociodemographic Variability in the Perception of Toxicity
Pia Pachinger, Anna Maria Planitzer, Allan Hanbury, Julia Neidhardt, Sophie Lecheler

International Communications Association Conference 2025
Like Walking a Tightrope: User-Centric Perspectives on Automated Content Moderation
Anna Maria Planitzer, Sophie Lecheler, Svenja Schäfer, Pia Pachinger (presented by Anna)

COMPTEXT 2025 
Incorporating User Perceptions of Online Norm Violations in Toxicity Detection Models
Pia Pachinger, Anna Maria Planitzer, Allan Hanbury, Julia Neidhardt, Rebekah Wegener, Sophie Lecheler

That' life.

2024 NAACL, Student Research Workshop 
Best PhD proposal 
User-Centric Offensive Text Detection in Culture-Specific Contexts: 
A PhD Proposal 
Pia Pachinger

2022 Inria, Paris
Design + interaction + AI hackathon 
Second Prize for That's life. 
Artifact publicly exhibited at Le Bis in Paris
Anaïs Cambou*, Anthonin Gourichon*, Fengyu Li*, Xiaoning Meng*, Pia Pachinger* (* equal contribution)

PhD in Informatics, TU Vienna, 2022 – 2026  
Natural Language Processing, User-Centric Offensive Text Detection in Culture-Specific Contexts

Master in Data Science, TU Vienna 
Machine Learning and Statistics, Natural Language Processing and Visual Analytics 
GPA 3.7 / 4.0

Languages 
German (native)
English (C1)
Spanish (C1)
Italian (very bad still :) )
Python

Bachelor in Mathematics
University of Vienna

2019 - 2020 Centre for Cyber Security
Austrian Institute of Technology 
Freelance researcher
Pre-training and evaluation of CNNs and LSTMs for anomaly detection in time series of system log data

2022 - 2026 Data Science Group, TU Vienna 
Prae-Doc researcher
TACo:  User-centric content moderation 
BrAIn: Domain-specific information extraction 
VHH: Evaluation of machine translation models 

2021 - 2022 Databases and Artificial Intelligence Group, TU Vienna 
Student researcher
Implementation of recommender system for scientific referees

2018 - 2020 Faculty of Mathematics, University of Vienna
Teaching Assistant