Raquel Fernández

Welcome

I am Full Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, a Fellow of the ELLIS Society (the European Laboratory on Learning and Intelligent Systems), and a board member of the ELLIS Amsterdam Unit.

As of April 2026, I am on temporary leave from ILLC/UvA to work as a research scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where I'm part of the directorate on Digital Transformation, Data, and AI.

I'm interested in natural language processing (NLP) by humans and machines, regarding both language understanding and generation. In my research, I use computational tools including deep learning models to investigate how cognitive constraints, social interaction, and perception shape language use. To what extent is language grounded in visual information? What coordination strategies help us to communicate successfully with our dialogue partners? And how can answers to these kinds of question lead to better NLP systems? My group and I carry out research on these and related topics from an interdisciplinary perspective, at the interface of computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Our publications can be found on the website of my lab, the Dialogue Modelling Group, the ACL anthology, and Google Scholar.

I have been fortunate to receive generous funding to support my work, including grants by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator grant 819455) and the Dutch Research Council (VENI, VIDI, and Aspasia). I studied Cognitive Science and Language in Barcelona (my home city) and obtained a PhD in NLP from King's College London. Before moving to Amsterdam, I held postdoctoral positions at the Linguistics Department of the University of Potsdam and at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University.