Aurelie Georgette Geraldine Herbelot

• 2006–2010 PhD in computer science, University of Cambridge, UK. Supervisor: Ann Copestake. Dissertation Title: Underspecified quantification
• 2005–2006 MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology, University of Cambridge, UK. Supervisor: Ann Copestake. Dissertation Title: Acquiring ontological relationships from corpora
• 2000–2005 BSc Hons in Information Technology and Computing (1:1), Open University, UK.
• 1997–1998 MA in Literature and Linguistics (‘Mention très bien’), Université de Savoie, France. Awarded with ‘Félicitations du jury’.
• 1994–1997 BA in Literature and Linguistics, Université de Savoie, France.

Positions held

• 2018- Ricercatore (tipo A), Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
• 2017-2018 Marie Curie-Sk lodowska Fellow, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
• 2015-2017 Postdoctoral fellow (assegnista di ricerca), on EU Starting Grant COMPOSES (PI: Marco Baroni), Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
• 2015 Postdoctoral researcher (wissentschaftlische Mitarbeiterin), Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Universität Stuttgart, Germany.
• 2013-2015 Research associate on the British Academy project From co-reference to reference resolution (PI: Simone Teufel), and for the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) Institute, University of Cambridge, UK.
• 2011-2013 Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Universität Potsdam, Germany.

Teaching

• University of Trento: lecturing Masters-level course Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing (2018-).
• University of Geneva: lecturing two Masters-level courses, Natural Language Processing and Scientific reading (2016-2017).
• University of Trento: lecturing Introduction to Computational Linguistics (2016, with Raffaella Bernardi).
• 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2012): Lecturer for the course ‘Distributional semantics for linguists’ (together with Ann Copestake).
• University of Cambridge: Masters in Computer Speech Text and Internet Technology: Demonstrator for grammar development practical (2006-2008).
• University of Cambridge: Computer Science Tripos: Supervisor for Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction courses (2006-2008).

My research is in the area of computational semantics. I aim at developing a cognitively plausible theory of the relationship between the meaning of linguistic expressions and the external world. To this end, I build computational models that combine theories of formal extensional linguistics with conceptual representations based on data. The ultimate goal is to understand how human beings manage to manipulate meaning in a compositional way, to interpret the outside world and act upon it.

My research is in the area of computational linguistics, with the following specialisations:

• formal semantics,
• distributional semantics,
• Vision and Language models in Artificial Intelligence,
• reference phenomena,
• models of quantification and genericity.

You can find out more information at: https://aurelieherbelot.net/.

Member of the Association for Computational Linguistics
 

Reviewing:

• Journals: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language, Cognitive Processing, Journal of Cognitive Science, Journal of Applied Logic, Journal of Information and Computation, Language Resources and Evaluation, Mind and Language, Minds and Machines, Natural Language Engineering, Philosophy and Technology, PeerJ.
• Conferences: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, 2011-), European chapter of the ACL (EACL, 2012-), North American Chapter of the ACL (NAACL, 2012-), Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, 2013-), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING, 2014-), International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS, 2015-), Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM, 2012-), International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017), Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2018), Computability in Europe (CiE, 2012), Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLIC-It, 2016-2018).
• Workshops: Workshop on Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS, 2019), Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language (SiVL, 2018-2019), Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-XI, 2017), Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH, 2016-2017), Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics (LSDSem 2017), Uphill Battles in Natural Language Processing (UBLP, 2016), Workshop on Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory (DSALT 2016), Workshop on Distributional Data Semantics (DiDaS, 2012), Computational Linguistics in the UK (CLUK).
• Book proposals: Cambridge University Press.
• Grant proposals: Swiss National Science Foundation (Switzerland), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany), Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, Netherlands).
• Awards: Best Paper Awards committee for the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018); Beth dissertation award committee (2020).

Chairing / organising:

• 2021 Senior area chair for the 16th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL2021).
• 2020 Area chair for the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2020).
• 2019 Faculty advisor to the Student Research Workshop at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2019).
• 2019 Area chair for the 6th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLIC-it) conference.
• 2018-2020 Co-organiser of SemEval-2019 and SemEval-2020 (the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation).
• 2018 Area chair and member of the best paper awards committee for the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018).
• 2017 Program co-chair for the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017).
• 2015 Area chair for ‘Formal and linguistic semantics’ at the 4th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2015).
• 2014-2015 Co-chair for Language and Computation at the 27th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2015 -- 48 courses and workshops).

Editorial work:

• 2016 Gemma Boleda and Aurélie Herbelot (eds.), Special Issue on 'Formal distributional semantics', Computational Linguistics.
• 2013 Aurélie Herbelot, Roberto Zamparelli and Gemma Boleda (eds.), Proceedings of the workshop 'Towards a Formal Distributional Semantics', International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS2013).

Grants and scholarships:

2017-2018 Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (24 months). Success rate 15%. Project score: 95.6%.
2016 Mozilla 'MOSS mission partner' award for my open-source project PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search).
2011-2013 Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers (24 months) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.
2005–2010 Full MPhil and PhD scholarships from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK.

Please refer to my list of publications. I am a regular contributor to top-ranked venues in Computational Linguistics, including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, EACL. (For information about conference ranking in Computational Linguistics, see this page).