I am Full Professor of Computational Linguistics & Dialogue Systems and the Vice-Director for Research at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where I lead the Dialogue Modelling Group. I'm a Fellow of the ELLIS Society (the European Laboratory on Learning and Intelligent Systems) and a board member of the ELLIS Amsterdam Unit.
I'm interested in natural language processing 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 DMG website, 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).
Prospective students: please read this before emailing me. I will not be taking any new PhD students as main supervisor in 2024 and I do not supervise internships; due to volume, I may not be able to respond to most emails about this, sorry.