Dr Raquel Garrido Alhama is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence for text and human interaction at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) , University of Amsterdam. She also co-directs the /k/omputation and Language Lab and previously served as Assistant Professor at the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence department of Tilburg University. She earned her PhD from the ILLC under the supervision of Jelle Zuidema, Remko Scha and Carel Ten Cate, with a dissertation entitled Computational Modelling of Artificial Language Learning . Prior post-doctoral positions include the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. Research Interests: Computational modelling of language learning and evolution Language acquisition, word learning and sentence processing Neural-symbolic integration and connectionist architectures Visual and auditory word recognition, syntactic parsing and part-of-speech tagging In recent years her work has converged on validating developmental milestones—such as the onset of productive determiner–noun combinations—using large-scale child corpora and neural models. She also investigates how multi-agent referential games can lead to emergent compositional languages, moving from image to richer graph representations. Scientific Awards: Best Article Award (2019) from Psychonomic Bulletin & Review for the review on computational models of rule learning Best Poster Award (2015) at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling Teaching & Supervision: Dr Alhama has designed and lectured courses on advanced programming for cognitive science, computational linguistics, linear algebra and language acquisition at Tilburg University, University of Amsterdam, Radboud University and the University of the Basque Country. She currently supervises eleven MSc and BSc students in AI, Logic and Cognitive Science. Labs & Teams: She is the founding co-director of the /k/omputation and Language Lab together with Phong Le, where they use Language Emergence frameworks to explore the cognitive prerequisites for displacement and compositionality in human language.






