Denis Paperno

Dr. Denis Paperno is an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at Utrecht University in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication within the Humanities faculty. He maintains a dual affiliation, working at Utrecht University while on détachement from a researcher position at CNRS (the National Center of Scientific Research). His academic background includes a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California Los Angeles and prior work at the University of Trento in Marco Baroni's research group.

Dr. Paperno's research expertise spans several critical domains in computational linguistics:

• Semantics and meaning representation
• Artificial Intelligence applications to language
• Distributional and neural semantic models
• Word embeddings and semantic compositionality
• Cross-modal and cross-lingual language understanding
• Language typology and lexical semantics

His research program investigates fundamental questions about computational meaning representation, exploring how word meanings interact to form complex expressions and how to integrate diverse information sources like images, knowledge bases, and linguistic resources into unified frameworks. He has developed significant benchmarks for evaluating language models and made important contributions to semantic typology and quantification theory.

Dr. Paperno's publication record demonstrates consistent contributions to top-tier computational linguistics venues, with recent work spanning theoretical linguistics to practical deep learning applications. His articles reveal expertise bridging formal semantic theory and cutting-edge neural network approaches to linguistic problems.

He is actively involved in teaching courses including 'Formal and Natural Languages,' 'Machine Learning I,' 'Models for Language Processing,' and 'Semantics.' Current research projects include work with Pablo Mosteiro funded by an Applied Data Science research grant from Utrecht University, and he is scheduled to deliver a keynote at the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) in Düsseldorf in September 2025.