I am an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), and I am the head of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group.
My main research area is Computational Linguistics (aka Natural Language Processing). I am interested in semantics, or how meaning works in natural languages. I work with computational models (distributional semantics, neural networks) that are able to induce very rich and flexible semantic representations directly from examples of how people use language. I am currently working on reference, or how we use language to talk about the world: I just need to utter a bunch of words, for instance "the smart woman we met the other day at the meeting", and my interlocutor will be able to identify the person I mean. I am building computational models that are able to do this, like humans do. I am funded by an ERC Starting Grant.
Contact
firstname.lastname@upf.edu
Department of Translation and Language Sciences
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Roc Boronat, 138
08018 Barcelona
Representative publications:
- Boleda, G. 2020. Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Annual Review of Linguistics: Accepted. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030303
- 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. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6.
- Del Tredici, M., R. Fernández, G. Boleda. 2019. Short-term meaning shift: a distributional exploration. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019 (Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics), 2069-2075, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics. [bib]
News
- October 2019: Invited speaker at EurNLP, London, UK, October 11.
- October 2019: Keynote speaker at 15th KONVENS (Erlangen, 9-11 Oct 2019)
- August 2019: Participated in the Lorentz Center workshop on Compositionality in Brains and Machines, Leiden, The Netherlands, August 5-9 2019.
- August 2019: Short paper presented at ACL 2019: Putting words in context: LSTM language models and lexical ambiguity, with Laura Aina and Kristina Gulordava.
- July 2019: Invited researcher at the IMS PhD Retreat.
- May 2019: Poster accepted at Sinn und Bedeutung 24: A closer look at scalar diversity using contextualized semantic similarity, with Matthijs Westera.
- May 2019: Paper accepted at Annual Review of Linguistics: Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory.
- May 2019: Invited speaker at the RELATIONS 2019 workshop co-located with IWCS 2019, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 23.
- May 2019: Invited speaker at the Vector Space Semantics for Dialogue and Discourse workshop co-located with IWCS 2019, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 24.
- March 2019: Long paper, oral presentation at IWCS 2019: Don't blame distributional semantics if it can't do entailment, with Matthijs Westera.
- February 2019: Two papers accepted at NAACL-HLT 2019: Laura Aina, Carina Silberer, Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Matthijs Westera and Gemma Boleda: What do entity-centric models learn? Insights from entity linking in multi-party dialogue; Marco Del Tredici, Raquel Fernandez and Gemma Boleda: Short-term meaning shift: a distributional exploration.
- December 2018: Keynote speaker at Multimodal session of Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium, Barcelona, December 20-21 2018.
- November 2018: Keynote speaker at BNAIC/BENELEARN 2018 (Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Annual Machine Learning Conference of the Benelux), ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, November 8-9 2018 (slides).