Raquel Fernandez

Raquel Fernández is a Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Dialogue Systems at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. She serves as Vice-Director for Research at ILLC and is a board member of the ELLIS Amsterdam Unit. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, with emphasis on dialogue modeling, multimodal processing, and language grounding in visual/social contexts.

Her work is supported by prestigious grants including the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant 819455) and multiple Dutch Research Council (NWO) awards (VENI, VIDI, Aspasia). She has received scientific recognition such as the Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP and Best Data Award at GenBench Workshop.

Her recent publications analyze multimodal dialogue systems, visual storytelling evaluation consistency, and co-speech gesture modeling, reflecting trends in Linguistic-Cognitive Integration, Multimodal AI, and Contextual NLP. She leads the Dialogue Modelling Group and has been actively involved in academic leadership as co-president of SemDial, VP-Elect for SIGDAT, and ethics chair for major conferences like COLM.

• Scientific Awards
  • ERC Consolidator Grant 819455
  • NWO VENI/VIDI/Aspasia grants
  • Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2023
  • Best Data Award at GenBench Workshop
  • Elected ELLIS Fellow 2023