Announcing our Trends in Language Evolution, Change, and Diversity workshop June 4th at UPF Poblenou! Featuring talks from Chiara Barbieri (Cagliari/Zürich), Gemma Boleda (ICREA/UPF), Karolina Grzech (UPF), Carmen Saldana (UB), Jamie D. Wright (Namur/Brussels) Sign up! www.upf.edu/web/colt/tre...

TRENCADIS Workshop - COLT: Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory - UPF

upf.edu

Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316

We are announcing a very new workshop! 🌿 MINT @ EMNLP 2026, 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue! ✨ mintworkshop.github.io Raquel Fernández, Diego Frassinelli, @esamghaleb.bsky.social, Bulat Khaertdinov, @asliozyurek.bsky.social Zerrin Yumak @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social

Congratulations @ec.europa.eu on the 30th anniversary of a great research funding program. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions provide excellence-based funding of different kinds. I’m particularly indebted to their post-doctoral fellowships—both as recipient and as host. Thank you! #MSCA #HorizonEU

EU Science, Research & Innovation@scienceinnovation.ec.europa.eu · 5mo ago

Over the past 30 years, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme has supported researchers across borders & disciplines - helping ideas travel, careers grow & discoveries shape our world. To celebrate, we're launching a special anniversary website, showcasing the stories, people and impact 🧪

*CfP* ESSLLI 2026 Workshop on Referring expression choice in grounded contexts: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational aspects, August 3-7, Prague. Submit before 31/3 here: openreview.net/group?id=ESS.... For more info, see below or here: www.upf.edu/web/glif/ess.... 1/3

Behind every medical advance, social study or cultural insight, there is research. #ICREAcall supports researchers with 20 permanent positions in Catalonia's research system:  🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social & Behavioural Sciences  📚 Humanities  🔬 Life Sciences & Medicine https://www.icrea.cat/icrea-call/

🎉 Avui és un dia especial! Celebrem els #25anysICREA al CCCB. Ens trobem més de 320 persones per celebrar un quart de segle de recerca d'excel·lència que ha transformat Catalunya i l'ha projectat al món. Avui, més que mai, tots #SomICREA.

Releasing v. 2.3 of ManyNames, an object naming dataset with 25K objects in real world images (English, plus partial coverage in Catalan and Mandarin Chinese). Check it out! amore-upf.github.io/manynames/ (New in this version: further data cleaning, speaker ID, more lexical info)

Presented at #DLBCN, a very nice yearly event showcasing what is done around Deep Learning in Barcelona. Come to the next edition!

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · 8mo ago

LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and distributed approaches to language (ACL Findings, 2025), a talk by Gemma Boleda @gboleda.bsky.social

There’s more to Neural Nets than big fat LLMs! We’ve built a NN-agent framework to simulate how people choose the best word in a given communication context (i.e. pragmatic naming behavior). With @yuqing0304.bsky.social, @ecesuurker.bsky.social, Tessa Verhoef, @gboleda.bsky.social

Yuqing Zhang@yuqing0304.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Ever wondered how our words change their meanings over time, and why languages keep both broad terms (“dog”) and specific ones (“Dalmatian”)? Our new paper asks that question, but instead of asking humans, we ask neural agents 🤖 🧵👇

Happy to announce a keynote lecture by @gboleda.bsky.social on "Why are Large Language Models so good at language?" at our Leibniz MMS Days next March (registration open until 7 January): www.wias-berlin.de/workshops/MM... www.wias-berlin.de/workshops/MM...

Ever wondered how our words change their meanings over time, and why languages keep both broad terms (“dog”) and specific ones (“Dalmatian”)? Our new paper asks that question, but instead of asking humans, we ask neural agents 🤖 🧵👇

New paper! 🚨 I argue that LLMs represent a synthesis between distributed and symbolic approaches to language, because, when exposed to language, they develop highly symbolic representations and processing mechanisms in addition to distributed ones. arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

CoNLL is over! Here’s most of the organizing team, next to the Danube in Vienna (missing ‪@nvshrao.bsky.social and Snigdha Chaturvedi). #conll2025 @conll-conf.bsky.social @microth.bsky.social @emcheng.bsky.social

Announcing the COLT Symposium on June 2nd! 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 What properties of language are emerging from work in experimental and theoretical linguistics, neuroscience & LLM interpretability? Info: tinyurl.com/colt-site Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 🧵1/3

🚨 Guest Speaker Alert! 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce that #CoNLL2025 will feature: 🥁 Raquel Fernández (University of Amsterdam) & Jean-Rémi King (@jeanremiking.bsky.social, CNRS / Meta AI)! 🎤✨ Check out their awesome work!👇

📢 Upcoming Seminar Words are weird? On the role of lexical ambiguity in language 🗣 Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Why is language so ambiguous? Discover how ambiguity balances cognitive simplicity and communicative complexity through large-scale studies. 📍 UniMiB, Room U6-01C, Milan

new pre-print: LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and continuous approaches to language arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and continuous approaches to language

Since the middle of the 20th century, a fierce battle is being fought between symbolic and continuous approaches to language and cognition. The success of deep learning models, and LLMs in particular,...

arxiv.org

📢 The Computational Linguistics Seminar series: the Interplay between Language and Reasoning is scheduled for Thursday, February 6th, 2025 (16:30) and will feature Raffaella Bernardi, University of Trento ✨ 📍 L0.06 of LAB42 UvA (live streaming on Zoom 🌍) 📎 projects.illc.uva.nl/LaCo/CLS/

CoNLL 2025 Call for Papers 😀! #CoNLL2025 conll.org 🔴 Co-located w/ ACL 2025 (July 31 - August 1) ⚪️ This year CoNLL will only accept direct submissions (ddl: March 14 2025) ⚫️ CoNLL will accept both non-archival and archival submissions!

This year, CoNLL will be accepting *non-archival* (as well as archival) submissions! www.conll.org #CoNLL2025 Follow CoNLL at @conll-conf.bsky.social

🔊New EMNLP paper from Eleonora Gualdoni & @gboleda.bsky.social ! Why do objects have many names? Human lexicons contain different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., purple or magenta for the same color. We investigate using tools from efficient coding...🧵 1/3