firstname.lastname@upf.edu

Phone: +34 93 542 2232

Where to find me

Office 53.708
Roc Boronat building (Communication-Poblenou campus) -- when you enter the building go to the reception (left) and take the elevator to the 7th floor; my office is in front of the elevator.

With funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715154).

I work as a tenure-track researcher (Ramón y Cajal fellow) 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.

Representative publications:

• Boleda, G. and A. Herbelot. 2016. Formal Distributional Semantics: Introduction to the Special Issue. Computational Linguistics 42:4, 619-635.
• 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. 
• 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), to appear, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.

For more, please check my publications, projects, resources, Google Scholar profile, and CV.

News

• 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: Short paper accepted at ACL 2019: Putting words in context: LSTM language models and lexical ambiguity, with Laura Aina and Kristina Gulordava.
• April 2019: Will be an invited speaker at EurNLP, London, UK, October 11.
• March 2019: Will be an invited speaker at the RELATIONS 2019 workshop co-located with IWCS 2019, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 23.
• March 2019: Long paper, oral presentation at IWCS 2019:  Don't blame distributional semantics 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.
• February 2019: Will be an invited speaker at the Vector Space Semantics for Dialogue and Discourse workshop co-located with IWCS 2019, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 24.
• February 2019: Invited to participate in the Lorentz Center workshop on Compositionality in Brains and Machines, Leiden, The Netherlands, August 5-9 2019.
• 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).
• October 2018: Co-organizer, Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium, Barcelona, December 20-21 2018.
• October 2018: Invited speaker at the Frontier Research and Artificial Intelligence conference organized by the ERCEA, Brussels, Belgium, 25-26 October 2018.
• August 2018: Keynote speaker at the BRIDGE and ARR workshops at ESSLLI 2018 (August 6-10, Sofia, Bulgaria). Slides here and here.
• August 2018: Short paper accepted at EMNLP 2018: How to represent a word and predict it, too: improving tied architectures for language modelling, with Kristina Gulordava and Laura Aina.