I am an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), and the co-head of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group.
I am a linguist who uses quantitative and computational methods to investigate how language works. I am in particular interested in how people convey meaning through language. I work with computational models (distributional semantics, neural networks) that are able to induce very rich and flexible linguistic representations directly from examples of language use. I am funded by an ERC Starting Grant.
Keywords: lexical semantics, concepts, categories, reference, lexicon, semantic theory, computational semantics, quantitative linguistics, data science for linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing, linguistics.
The best way to reach me is by e-mail: firstname.lastname@upf.edu. Here you have my full contact information.
Thinking of applying for an ERC grant, or a post-doctoral fellowship in Spain or Europe? Here you will find successful applications in case that helps.
representative publications
- Brochhagen, T., G. Boleda. 2022. When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in colexification. Cognition, Volume 226, 105179. [video]
- Boleda, G. 2020. Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 6: 213-23. (Pre-print version)
- Silberer, C., S. Zarrieß, M. Westera, G. Boleda. 2020. Humans Meet Models on Object Naming: A New Dataset and Analysis. In Proceedings of COLING 2020, 1893-1905.
- McNally, L., G. Boleda. 2017. Conceptual Versus Referential Affordance in Concept Composition. In Yoad Winter & James Hampton (eds.) Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology 245-267. Springer.
news
- August 2022: talk at the Language, Cognition, and Computation (LCC) group, University of Toronto: "The interplay between cognitive and communicative pressures in the lexicon " (slides).
- August 2022: Eleonora Gualdoni and I presented two papers at CogSci: Woman or tennis player? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variation in object naming, by Eleonora Gualdoni, Andreas Mädebach, Thomas Brochhagen, Gemma Boleda; and Effects of task and visual context on referring expressions using natural scenes, by Andreas Mädebach, Eleonora Gualdoni, Ekaterina Torubarova, Gemma Boleda.
- June 2022: collaborator in Yang Xu's NSERC Alliance International - Catalyst Grant (ALLRP) "Universal knowledge engines for lexical semantic creativity in humans and machines" (2022-2023).
- June 2022: paper published in Cognition: When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in colexification, with Thomas Brochhagen.
- May 2022: paper published at the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP: Challenges in including extra-linguistic context in pre-trained language models, with Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc and Laura Aina.
- April 2022: will be an invited speaker at the Amsterdam Colloquium this year (happening in December).
- April 2022: co-organized the AMORE Mini-workshop on Referential Information in Deep Learning Models.
- March-April 2022: my two PhD students Laura Aina and Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc successfully defended their theses. Congratulations! :)
- March 2022: co-organized the AMORE Mini-workshop on Linguistic Ambiguity and Deep Learning.
- December 2021: Abralin Ao Vivo talk "When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in the lexicon" (video; paper).
- December 2021: two abstracts accepted at SCiL: Horse or pony? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variability in object naming, with Eleonora Gualdoni, Thomas Brochhagen, and Andreas Mädebach, and The interaction between cognitive ease and informativeness shapes the lexicons of natural languages, with Thomas Brochhagen.
- November 2021: paper published at CoNLL 2021: Does referent predictability affect the choice of referential form? A computational approach using masked coreference resolution, with Laura Aina, Xixian Liao, and Matthijs Westera.
- November 2021: paper published at BlackBoxNLP 2021: Controlled tasks for model analysis: Retrieving discrete information from sequences, with Ionut Sorodoc and Marco Baroni.
- September 2021: project granted (co-PI with Louise McNally): "CORE: Contextual effects in the choice of referring expressions for visually presented entities" (AEI Spain, PID2020-112602GB-I00; 2021-2025).
- September 2021: paper published in the Cognitive Science journal: Distributional models of category concepts based on names of category members, with Matthijs Westera, Abhijeet Gupta, and Sebastian Padó.
- May 2021: back from a 6-month long sick leave caused by my psychiatric illness.