I am an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), and 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
+34 93 532 2232
Representative publications
- Boleda, G. 2020. Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 6: 213-23. 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.
- Aina, L., Silberer, C., Sorodoc, I., Westera, M., Boleda, G. 2019. What do entity-centric models learn? Insights from entity linking in multi-party dialogue. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019, 3772-3783.
News
- January 2020: Annual Review of Linguistics paper out! Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory (Vol. 6: 213-23).
- December 2019: co-organizing the GeCKo symposium on Integrating Generic and Contextual Kowledge, Barcelona, May 18. The call for contributions is open!
- December 2019: Talk at DLBCN 2019 on joint work with Marco Del Tredici and Raquel Fernandez, published at NAACL: Short-term meaning shift: a distributional exploration.
- December 2019: Very happy to start my job as an ICREA Research Professor. A great honor and a long-standing dream!
- October 2019: Will be an invited speaker at the LANTERN 2020 workshop (Barcelona, September 2020).
- October 2019: Invited speaker at EurNLP, London, UK, October 11.
- October 2019: Keynote speaker at 15th KONVENS, Erlangen, Germany, October 9-11.
- 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: 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.