Raquel Fernández

Raquel Fernández is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Dialogue Systems at the University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC). As Vice-Director for Research at ILLC and a Fellow of the ELLIS Society, she bridges computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence through her research on language use in multimodal and conversational contexts.

• PhD in Computational Linguistics from King's College London
• Prior research positions at University of Potsdam and Stanford University's CSLI

Her work explores how cognitive constraints, social interaction, and perception shape language use, with a focus on:

• Visually-grounded language processing
• Multimodal dialogue modeling
• Model uncertainty and calibration
• Language grounding in multimodal data
• Language learning and semantic change
• Dialogue reference resolution

Recent publications analyze multimodal reasoning limitations, cross-lingual knowledge consistency, and uncertainty modeling in dialogue systems. She has received multiple accolades including an ERC Consolidator Grant, NWO VENI/VIDI/Aspasia fellowships, and EMNLP/GenBench awards.

• Outstanding Paper Award (EMNLP 2023)
• Best Data Award (GenBench Workshop 2023)
• ELLIS Society Fellow
• ERC Consolidator Grant #819455 recipient
• NWO VENI/VIDI/Aspasia awardee

As a leader in academic service, she serves on the SIGDAT Executive Committee and chairs multiple conference committees. Her lab develops models for multimodal dialogue, visual storytelling, and grounded language understanding.