“I’d love to go to Kashmir and spread my knowledge. If I could get some opportunity to create a platform, I would definitely love to do it”
Sania’s story is a powerful example of resilience and ambition as both her personal life and professional career have been deeply shaped by the region she comes from, Kashmir. Since 1947 it has been at the centre of a long-standing territorial dispute between Pakistan and India that has been marked by multiple wars, border skirmishes and ongoing political tensions. These struggles affected people’s daily lives, identities and aspirations and Sania is no exception. She comes from Azad Kashmir, the part of the region currently under the administrative and political control of Pakistan. In Rawalakot Sania completed her master’s degree in computer science and has been a teacher at the university for three years. Nevertheless, in a country with a political war going on, it is common to have the internet restricted or slowed down to contain the spread of risky information. However, this also restricts everyday actions like video or audio calls, sending voice notes or pictures, and participating in online job meetings. Imagine what this meant for Sania when she decided to apply for a PhD abroad. It was very difficult for her to talk with professors.
“I couldn’t work there when I was there. A real-time connection was not possible for me”.
In January 2023, she was admitted by the University of Modena for her PhD and Italy was not a random choice to proceed her career. Most of the academic articles she was interested in were written by researchers of Italian universities and she heard that generally there, even with a heavy workload, professors were not used to burdening students. Unfortunately, she could not discover it until half of her first year of PhD, months that she lost waiting and working in Kashmir because of visa issues. Like many Pakistani students, she faced numerous challenges in obtaining her visa to leave the country, primarily due to delays in appointment scheduling by the Italian embassy in Pakistan, as well as additional bureaucratic complications that make the process particularly difficult for Pakistani applicants. She obtained her visa only in July and what she knew turned out to be true together with so much more. For international students professors sometimes become important points of reference and so it is in her case. Her supervisor was used to the problems that international students face and helped her find her residence, essential in Italy. She now lives in Modena, quite close to the university campus. She likes the city and most importantly she loves the way her supervisor gets the job done with her team. Together they work on a project that applies computer science to a particular field of research.
Sania’s main research focuses on AI-based knowledge extraction for multilingual and multi-alphabetic heritage in religious and historical contexts. Her project, called “Digital Maktaba” – meaning Digital library – is an interdisciplinary initiative funded by ITSERR, a Research Infrastructure for Religious Studies. Her research focuses on topic modelling, a technique used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify topics in a text corpus, in one of the low-resource languages considered: Arabic. Through Large Language Models (LLMs) she analyses texts related to the Hadith studies. The Hadith is the second main source of guidance for Muslims, after the Quran, and consists of narrations documenting the sayings, actions and approvals of Prophet Muhammad. She is passionate about her research and work, and she believes that she is making a meaningful contribution to the field of Arabic NLP. One of the reasons is that along with her research group, they analyse the limitations of AI models in handling religious texts, and they have observed that artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, often fabricate information, particularly when dealing with complex religious topics. They sometimes have fun interrogating the AI and she tells us of when this gave them the name of the car that Horera, a companion of the prophet, used to drive in 1400 BC!
“The problem we figured out is that when you are going to talk to a LLM, like GPT, about common topics, it is going to answer correctly. But, when you ask an uncommon one, it will give you a hallucination, a fabricated answer”.
Sania has recently published several articles that have been highly appreciated and accepted at top-tier conferences in Dubai and Miami. She was honoured to have received invitations to present her work, but unfortunately, she was unable to attend them. Despite her merit and contributions, political restrictions once again overshadowed her opportunities. Dubai had imposed a visa ban on Pakistani citizens, and even though she attempted to apply using her Italian residence permit, her request was denied. Instead, her supervisor along with a close friend, attended the event and presented the paper on her behalf. In Miami she had to present her main research paper, she was not able to go there but at least this time, she could present it online.
“Because of the visa, you need to show from which country you belong. This is the problem with the Pakistani passports, sometimes they are not going to allow you in most of the cases. We keep on downing”.
She is currently working on a paper that tests the reliability of translations from Arabic to other languages. In the future, with some of her Pakistani friends, they aim to research on their own language, Urdu, and Sania’s eyes lit up at the only prospect of it.
At the beginning it was difficult for her to understand how everything worked. In Pakistan, and less than all in Kashmir, there are huge differences in terms of resources and technologies at the disposal of both teachers and students. This determines the fact that topics like the AI are studied but there is not the possibility, and consequently the motivation, to experiment on it and discover something new. Also because of these reasons, she wants to complete all her education opportunities in Italy even because at the moment, there are few possibilities for her future because of the lack of research centres, institutions and platforms through which she could work.
“I’d love to go to Kashmir and extend my knowledge. If I could get some opportunity to create a platform, I would definitely love to do it because I know my people, they have suffered a lot”.
In Kashmir she would like to have the freedom to speak and express oneself, something she is witnessing in Italy, together with the way the law and the government safeguard both minors and women. While she loves the fact that each country has its own culture that cannot be easily adapted elsewhere, what makes her suffer sometimes is the fact that in Italy many stereotypes both on Muslim and Pakistani people are spread. To get adapted sometimes is not easy, and as a girl wearing the Hijab she had some concerns at the beginning, some unwanted glances bothered her and only after a while all changed.
She is now learning Italian, the idiomatic expressions and gestures, all very new to her. Thanks to her work collaborations, she had the possibility to visit Palermo and Napoli where she loved the food even if ice-cream is what she loves the most! Nevertheless, on one aspect she cannot be happy about her life in Italy: the medical insurance. While during her first year it was affordable, later it became impossible to pay. Like many other international students, she now has a Pakistani emergency doctor but of course it is not possible to have medicines prescriptions or proper suggestions on how to proceed.
In her future, she wants to keep on working in this domain in Italy, hopefully in her postdoc period, and keep giving her contribution in the field of NLP in Arabic, and who knows, maybe sooner than she thinks, also in Urdu!