Contact

firstname.lastname@upf.edu

Phone: +34 93 542 2232

Where to find me

Office 53.708
Roc Boronat building (Communication-Poblenou campus)

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).

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.

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

Keywords

News

• September 2016: Invited speaker at TbiLLC 2017 in Lagodekhi (Georgia).
• September 2016: Invited speaker at INLG 2017 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (slides). Covered in the news here and here.
• September 2016: We'll present our paper at IWCS 2017: Living a discrete life in a continuous world: Reference in cross-modal entity tracking, with Sebastian Padó, Nghia The Pham and Marco Baroni.
• August 2017: Short paper at STARSEM 2017: Distributed Prediction of Relations for Entities: The Easy, The Difficult, and The Impossible, with Abhijeet Gupta and Sebastian Padó.
• July 2017: Our project AMORE has been awarded an artist in residency through the EU-funded VERTIGO STARTS program; we will host Kate Aspinall.
• April 2017: Presenting short paper (oral) at EACL 2017: Instances and concepts in distributional space, with Sebastian Padó and Abhijeet Gupta (slides).
• March 2017: The AMORE project is featured in Spanish newspaper El Periódico (Spanish, Catalan).
• March 2017: Invited speaker at the 18th Szklarska Poreba Workshop, Poland (slides).
• February 2017: Very happy that the ERC Starting Grant project AMORE: A distributional MOdel of Reference to Entities has started!
• February 2017: Invited talk at INRIA, Lille, France (slides).
• January 2017: The Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on Formal Distributional Semantics, that Aurélie Herbelot and me have edited, is out! Check also our Introductory article to the topic.
• January 2017: Invited talk at ILLC, Amsterdam (slides).
• January 2017: Very happy to join the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra as a tenure-track researcher!
• December 2016: Final version, Conceptual vs. Referential Affordance in Concept Composition, with L. McNally. To appear in Yoad Winter & James Hampton (eds.) Concept Composition and Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics, Springer.
• December 2016: Talk at MAIN@NIPS (MAchine INtelligence workshop, NIPS 2016), Barcelona.
• September 2016: We have released the test set of LAMBADA, our text understanding dataset. Download it and improve on 0% accuracy! (See associated paper at ACL 2016).