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), 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 vs. Referential Affordance in Concept Composition. In Yoad Winter & James Hampton (eds.) Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology, 245-267. Springer. 
• Bruni, E., G. Boleda, M. Baroni, N. K. Tran. 2012. Distributional semantics in technicolor. Proceedings of ACL 2012, pp. 136-145, Jeju Island, Korea.

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

News

• March 2018: Will be an invited speaker at the annual conference of the COMPLEXITAT network (May 29, Barcelona).
• February 2018: Invited to write a survey article for Annual Review of Linguistics.
• February 2018:  Will be an invited speaker at the ARR workshop at ESSLLI 2018 (August 6-10, Sofia, Bulgaria).
• February 2018: Our research group COLT (Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory) has obtained funding from the Catalan government (SGR 2017 1575).
• January 2018: Elia Bruni's Marie Sklodowska-Curie project MAGIC, of which I am the coordinator, has been positively evaluated!
• January 2018: Will be an invited speaker at the BRIDGE workshop at ESSLLI 2018 (August 6-10, Sofia, Bulgaria).
• January 2018: Invited to contribute a post on how to review to the NAACL HLT 2018 blog.
• December 2017: Participating in the MENTOS Mentoring Female Engineering Students Program of UPF's Technology Department. 
• September 2017: Invited to be a member of the standing review committee, Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics (TACL) journal, 2017-2019 term.
• September 2017: The following article is out! McNally, L., G. Boleda. 2017. Conceptual vs. 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.
• September 2017: Invited speaker at TbiLLC 2017 in Lagodekhi, Georgia (slides).
• September 2017: Invited speaker at INLG 2017 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (slides). Covered in the news here and here.
• September 2017: Poster 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.