I am an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I co-lead the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group. I previously held post-doctoral positions at the the Computer Science department of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), the department of Linguistics of The University of Texas at Austin (USA), and the CIMEC Center for Brain/Mind Sciences of the University of Trento (Italy). Before that, I graduated in Spanish Philology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and obtained my PhD in Cognitive Science and Language at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (both in Spain). I was also a visiting researcher at the Computational Linguistics & Phonetics department (CoLi) of Saarland University and the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) of the University of Stuttgart, both in Germany.

I want to understand how language works; in particular, how humans convey meaning through language, how the formal properties of language support communication, and how languages are shaped by both cognitive and communicative factors. I study these dynamics in a range of domains and phenomena, with special emphasis on the lexicon (vocabulary), and I investigate which aspects are universal across languages, and what governs variation. My team and I work with a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates methodologies from Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science. Our approach requires large amounts of data, and part of our work involves gathering linguistic data on a large scale.