Giulia Rambelli
I am a Post-doc for the Institute of Language, Communication, and the Brain (ILCB) at Aix-Marseille University (France).
I am a computational and cognitive linguist working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, theoretical linguistics, and human communication. My research investigates how meaning is constructed, generalized, and innovated in language, both by humans and (large) language models, through the study of compositionality, analogy, and conceptual abstraction. I combine deep linguistic expertise with computational methods to advance our understanding of computational models and language.
In my thesis, I studied the balance between compositional and direct access to meaning, and how the cognitive process of analogy can be represented as a source of linguistic productivity from a theoretical and computational perspective.
Since my PhD and especially during my postdoc at the University of Bologna (ERC-founded project ABSTRACTION), I became more and more fascinated about how do people generalize from specific linguistic expressions to generate novel creative ones. My research agenda is therefore to investigate the tension between linguistic productivity and creativity, to understand the cognitive mechanisms of linguistic innovation and how do humans and machines generalize linguistic meaning beyond experience.
Since my PhD and especially during my postdoc at the University of Bologna (ERC-founded project ABSTRACTION), I became more and more fascinated about how do people generalize from specific linguistic expressions to generate novel creative ones. My research agenda is therefore to investigate the tension between linguistic productivity and creativity, to understand the cognitive mechanisms of linguistic innovation and how do humans and machines generalize linguistic meaning beyond experience.
I received several awards, including the Baidu AACL-IJCNLP Best Paper Award 2020, the Best Paper Award at *SEM 2021, and the Outstanding Paper Award at MWE 2023. In 2024, I published my first monograph, Constructions and Compositionality: Cognitive and Computational Explorations, with Cambridge University Press. I published in major *CL conferences and workshops.
I obtained a joint PhD degree in Linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy) and Aix-Marseille University (France), under the joint supervision of Alessandro Lenci and Philippe Blache. I was a member of the Computational Liguistics Laboratory (University of Pisa) and the Laboratoire Parole et Language (AMU) of the Institute of Language, Communication, and the Brain (ILCB).
I am part of the organizing committee of the international workshops Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (since 2023) and Analogy-angle (since 2025), colocated with leading conferences in NLP and AI (*CL, IJCAI). Since 2026, I am also an Adjunct professor in Formal Methods and Models for Computational Linguistics (50hours), MA in Computing Linguistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy).
--> News
- 20.03.2026 - I have an oral talk at the ILCB docs&post-docs Workshop
- 12.01.2026 - I am invited to give a talk at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart.
- 1.01.2026 - Happy to announce that I started my Postoctoral Fellowship at the Aix-Marseille University, under the joint supervision of prof. Abdellah Fourtassi and Laurent Prévot!
Latest publications
- Sommerauer, Pia, Rambelli, Giulia, Caselli, Tommaso (2025). Simulating Identity, Propagating Bias: Abstraction and Stereotypes in LLM-Generated Text. In *Findings of EMNLP 2025 (Suzhou, China)*
- Andrea Pedrotti, Giulia Rambelli, Caterina Villani, Marianna Bolognesi (2025). How Humans and LLMs Organize Conceptual Knowledge: Exploring Subordinate Categories in Italian. In *ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria)*
- Giulia Rambelli (2024). Constructions and Compositionality: Cognitive and Computational Explorations. Cambridge University