Website of Raquel Fernandez

2025

On sabbatical from mid September 2025 to March 2026.
Vice-Director for Research at the ILLC, until August 2025
Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Lecture on Multimodal NLP at the Athens NLP Summer School 2025.
Invited talk at CoNLL 2025 in Vienna.
Lecture at the 4th AIHUB Summer School organised by the Spanish Research Council.
Lecture and hands-on lab on multimodal processing in face-to-face dialogue at the MEDAL Summer School on Computational Modelling in Birmingham, together with Esam Ghaleb.
Ethics co-chair for COLM 2025.
I got elected VP-Elect for SIGDAT, the ACL's Special Interest Group in charge of EMNLP!
Supervision of MSc students: Toyesh Chakravorty (AI UvA), Simone Baratella, Samuele Antonelli
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Jaap Kruijt, Alina Leidinger, David Stap

2024

Vice-Director for Research at the ILLC
Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Invited contributor on the topic of AI as a Catalyst for Change at ScienceÑL, the 1st Spanish/Dutch Scientific Congress, hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Interviewed on chatbots by Het Parool, Het Financieele Dagblad, and the KPN/XS4All blog
Invited talk at the Distinguished Lecture Series of the ELLIS Unit Stuttgart.
Keynote speaker at the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) in Philadelphia.
Lecturer on Multimodal NLP at the Athens NLP Summer School.
Co-chair of the ACL Best Paper Awards committee.
Invited speaker at the Neuro-AI Symposium on bridging the gap between human and machine intelligence, in Amsterdam.
Participant and commentator at the NSF workshop on New Horizons in Language Science.
Area Chair for the new Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).
Lecturer at the ELLIS Winter School on Foundation Models.
Invited speaker at the WIC Mid-Winter Meeting on Generative AI in an information technology context.
Invited talk at the ILFC Seminar.
Supervision of MSc students: Nikos Apostolikas
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Nicola De Cao, Samarth Bhargav, Sarah Ibrahimi

2023

Vice-Director for Research at the ILLC
Elected ELLIS Fellow
June 2023: With some delay, I finally gave the inaugural lecture of my professorship - "oratie" in Dutch; here is the video of the ceremony.
Senior Area Chair for EACL 2024 in the "Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics" track.
Invited speaker at IWCS in Nancy.
Invited talk at the Max Planck Institute Colloquium in Nijmegen.
Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
In January 2023, my colleagues and I organised the outreach event "An afternoon with ChatGPT" (video) inspired by "An evening with ChatGPT" by GroNLP (video).
Reviewer of grant proposal for UKRI
Supervision of MSc students: Pauline Sander (Erasmus), Iris Luden, Jelle Bosscher, Ilke Asal, Torrey Snyder
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Marlou Rasenberg, Samira Abnar, Maartje ter Hoever, Zhewei Sun, Mitja Nikolaus

2022

Senior Area Chair for EMNLP 2022 in the "Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics" track.
Invited speaker at UnGroundNLP-2022: Uncertainty and Grounding in Language and Translation Modelling in Helsinki.
Invited speaker at AKBC 2022 in London (cancelled due to health).
Senior Area Chair for NAACL 2022 in the "Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics" track.
Action Editor for the ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Reviewer of grant proposals for ERC and ISF
Supervision of MSc students: Xinyi Chen, Lars Laichter
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, Alessandro Suglia, Jiahuan Pei

2021

Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Member of the scientific advisory board of SIGdial
Reviewer of grant proposals for the Spanish Research Council
Invited speaker at Meaning in Context: Pragmatic Communication in Humans and Machines (MiC @ NeurIPS 2021).
Invited speaker at the 2nd ELLIS NLP Workshop.
Invited speaker at the Visual Question Answering Worskop at CVPR 2021.
Invited talk at the workshop on NLP Beyond Text, part of the Web Conference 2021.
Talks at the CogAI Seminar and the Cornell Learning Machines Seminar (video).
Supervision of MSc students: Lennert Jansen
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Jie Zou, Seyyed Hadi Hashemi

2020

Co-chair of CoNLL-2020, the SIGNLL conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Dominican Republic (ended up being online).
Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Member of the scientific advisory board of SIGdial
Reviewer for the special issue on dialogue and dialogue systems of the journal TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues)
Reviewer of grant proposals for ERC
Invited speaker at the GeCKo symposium on Integrating Generic and Contextual Knowledge, UPF, Barcelona.
Keynote speaker at the Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC 2020) in November.
New project funded by Human(e)AI with Sandro Pezzelle and Margot van der Goot on Exploring Adaptation of Conversational Systems to Different Age Groups.
Marco Del Tredici successfully defended his PhD thesis Linguistic Variation in Online Communities: A Computational Perspective.
Supervision of MSc students: Yulya Parfenova, Eleonora Gualdoni.
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Dieuwke Hupkes, Jasmijn Bastings, Ziming Li

2019

Member of the board of reviewers of the journal Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Member of the scientific advisory board of SIGdial
Editorial Board member of Computational Linguistics journal.
Co-organiser of the 2nd workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language (SiVL) at NAACL-2019.
PC member for: ACL, EMNLP, NoDaLiDa, SemDial, SIGdial, CoNLL
Reviewer of grant proposals for ERC, ISF, and EPSRC.
Participant at the Lorentz Center workshop on Compositionality in Brains and Machines
Participant at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Joint Processing of Language and Visual Data for Better Automated Understanding
Keynote at CLiC-it 2019, the 6th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics
Invited talk at the First Siri Workshop on Conversational AI, Apple, Cambridge.
Keynote at NLP Workshop at Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus
Keynote at the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP at ACL-2019
Keynote at the workshop on Vector Semantics for Dialogue and Discourse at IWCS-2019
Supervision of MSc students: Tim Baumgaertner, Ece Takmaz, Mario Giulianelli
PhD thesis evaluation committees: Ekaterina Abramova, Emiel van Miltenburg, Sara Moradlou

2018

Editorial Board member of Computational Linguistics journal.
Co-organiser of the workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language (SiVL) at ECCV-2018.
Keynote talk at Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium (DLBCN)
Invited speaker at Google's Assistant and Dialog Workhop.
Chair for Language and Computation area at ESSLLI 2019.
PC member for: COLING 2018 EMNLP 2018, CoNLL 2018, SemDial 2018 (AixDial), SIGdial 2018, *SEM 2018, Ethics in NLP
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.
Supervision of MSc students: Jacob Verdegaal, Janosch Haber, Yujie Xing (MSc Logic), Aashish Venkatesh, Ujjwal Sharma, Sanne Bouwmeester

2017

Editorial Board member of Computational Linguistics journal.
Keynote talk at the workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) part of EACL 2017.
Area chair for Dialogue at ACL 2017.
Invited speaker at the Facebook Faculty Summit at FAIR NYC in October 2017.
Area chair for Discourse and Dialogue at *SEM 2017
PC member for EACL 2017, CoNLL 2017, EMNLP 2017, SIGdial 2017, IWCS 2017, SemDial 2017 (SaarDial), Ethics in NLP.
Management Committee member ICT COST Action on Integrating Language and Vision, since 2014.
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse, since 2009.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.

2016

Invited speaker at two NIPS 2016 workshops: Machine Intelligence and Learning Methods for Dialogue.
Course on the Fundamentals of Linguistic Interaction taught at NASSLLI 2016 in July.
General chair of SIGdial 2016, Los Angeles, September 2016.
PC member of ACL 2016, Interspeech 2016, EMNLP 2016, COLING 2016
Advisory committee member of FETLT 2016.
Management Committee member ICT COST Action on Integrating Language and Vision, since 2014.
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse, since 2009.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.

2012

Member of the evaluation committee for NWO Mozaeik grants
Visiting researcher at the Center for Language Technology, Gothenburg (May 2012)
PC member: Workshop on Language, Action and Perception at SLTC
PC member: SemDial 2012 (SeineDial)
PC member: SIGdial 2012
PC member: *SEM
PC member: EACL 2012
PC member: ACL 2012
Member of the scientific advisory board of SIGdial, term 2012-2014.
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse, since 2009.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008

2011

PC member: IJCNLP 2011
PC member: SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue)
PC member: SIGdial 2011
PC member: ACL 2011
PC member: IWCS 2011
Reviewer for the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium
Reviewer for the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT)
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse, since 2009.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.

2010

Technical programme chair of SIGdial 2010
PC member: ACL 2010
PC member: SemDial 2010 (PozDial)
PC member: Workshop on Theories of Information Dynamics and Interaction and their Application to Dialogue
Member of the advisory committee and invited panelist at the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems
Comentator at PALMYR 2010
Visiting Fellow of the Dialogue Systems Group at City University of Hong Kong (March 2010)
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse, since 2009.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.

2009

Reviewer for ACL 2009
Reviewer for EACL 2009
Reviewer for EACL 2009 Student Workshop
PC member: SemDial'09 (DiaHolmia)
PC member: SRSL'09
Reviewer for Natural Language Engineering
Co-founding and managing Editor of Dialogue & Discourse.
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series, since 2008.

2008

Reviewer for EMNLP 2008
PC member: SIGDial 2008
PC member: SemDial'08 (LONDIAL)
Reviewer for Journal of Semantics
Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
Course on Computational Dialogue Modelling taught at ESSLLI 2008
Co-President of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series

2007

PC member: SemDial'07 (Decalog)
PC member: SRSL'07
Reviewer for Journal of Logic, Language and Information
Reviewer for THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science
Member of the SemDial Board overseeing the SemDial Workshop Series

2006

Co-chair of Programme and Organising Commmittees of SemDial'06 (brandial)
PC member: ESSLLI 2006 Workshop on Coherence in Generation and Dialogue

2005

PC member: SemDial'05 (Dialor)

Raquel Fernández

Activities

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

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2005