Meta Research

I am a Research Scientist at Meta AI Research, based in Paris. Before I joined Meta, I obtained my PhD in computational linguistics at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), at the Institute for Logic, Language and Information. I also worked briefly at a postdoc at the UvA, where I was also the Scientific Manager of the Amsterdam unit of ELLIS. I have a Master's Degree in logic and a Bachelor's Degree in (astro)physics. My main research goal is to understand more about the beautifully complex system that is language, and how it is possible that humans are so good at it. I am particularly interested in syntax, hierarchy, structure and compositionality. The way that I approach this goal, is by studying neural networks tapping using the vast amount of knowledge we have about language from (psycho/neuro/theoretical)linguistics and philosophy and — in the process — use that knowledge to sharpen our understanding of language (processing). Tasks that I find particularly interesting are machine translation, language modelling and all kinds of versions of natural language understanding.