Gemma Boleda, ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain); co-director of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group. You can reach me via email at firstname.lastname@upf.edu or snail mail here.

I want to understand how language works; in particular, how humans convey meaning through language. The focus of my research is how the linguistic system and its use in communication influence each other. For instance, a speaker of English can use different expressions (e.g. "the dog" or "the chihuahua") when referring to a given chihuahua. The choice depends, a.o., on the words available in the language and the properties of the object and the communicative context. In turn, over time, specific speaker choices change the linguistic system itself. I study these dynamics in a range of semantic phenomena, such as how the vocabularies of natural languages partition the world into words, why words tend to have several meanings, how these meanings look like, and what is universal and what subject to variation in this realm. My team and I work with a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates methodologies from Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science. Our approach requires large amounts of data, and part of our work involves gathering linguistic data on a large scale.

I teach Computational Semantics in the Master's in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

I suffer from a psychiatric illness, and I didn't dare put this on my webpage until I got a permanent position.

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sample publications