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.
Research interests
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.
Selected publications
- Boleda G 2025, 'LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and distributed approaches to language', Find.Ass.Comput.Ling. EMNLP 2025, 9365–9379.
- Boleda G et al. 2025, 'The role of referent predictability in pronoun production: Insights from a Bayesian meta-analysis', Lang. 101, 3, 445-499.
- Boleda G et al. 2025, 'Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning', Ass.Comp.Linguistics.
- Boleda G et al. 2025, 'NeLLCom-Lex: A Neural-agent Framework to Study the Interplay between Lexical Systems & Language Use', In Find.Ass.Comp.Ling.: EMNLP. 10929–10945
- Boleda G 2025, 'L’ambigüitat: nous camins, velles fronteres', Fortuny J, Francesch P, Nogué N, Payrató L (eds.), L’ambigüitat: nous camins, velles fronteres, Edicions UB, Col·lecció Ling.Cat.24, ISBN: 978-84-1050-144-7.
- Boleda G & Baroni M et al. 2025 'Not a nuisance but a useful heuristic: Outlier dimensions favor frequent tokens in language models', Proceedings of the 8th BlackBoxNLP workshop: analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP, pp 109-136.
Selected research activities
Recognition from the research and academic community:
- Evening lecture (akin to Keynote) in the 36th European Summer School In Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2026; Bochum, Germany.
- Invited talks at the Research Centre in Psychology and Neurosciences in Aix Marseille University (France) and the Dept. Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy).
- Program Chair, by invitation, 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025).
- Jury member, by invitation, for two associate professorships with tenure (U. Santiago de Compostela & U. Barcelona) & a PhD thesis in Aix Marseille University.
Continued to attract funding:
- Supervisor, FI SDUR 2025 PhD grant to E. Ürker, U. Pompeu Fabra, 1/12/2025-30/11/2028.
- Supervisor, Fundación Ramón Areces PhD grant to N. Graichen, U. Pompeu Fabra, 1/1/2025-31/12/2028.
Other:
- Chair, COLT Symposium on Emergent features of language in minds and machines, U. Pompeu Fabra.