Thomas Brochhagen

I conduct research in cognitive science. My work aims to understand why languages are the way they are, how they came to be this way, and what this tells us about their users.

I'm a tenure-track professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. You can reach me via email at firstname.lastname@upf.edu (English, German, Spanish, or Catalan); or physically at Roc Boronat 138, office 52.609.

Research

Language evolution in silico: from large-scale data to artificial agents creating languages from scratch
Thomas Brochhagen. To appear. Mètode Science Studies Journal. DOI: 10.7203/metode.15.27692

From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity
Thomas Brochhagen, Gemma Boleda, Eleonora Gualdoni & Yang Xu. 2023. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.ade7981
[pre-print] [supplementary material] [code repository] [commentary by S.J. Greenhill]

What's in a name? A large-scale computational study on how competition between names affects naming variation
Eleonora Gualdoni, Thomas Brochhagen, Andreas Mädebach & Gemma Boleda. 2023. Journal of Memory and Language. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2023.104459
[code repository] [demo 1] [demo 2]

A computational analysis of crosslinguistic regularity in semantic change
Olivia Fugikawa, Oliver Hayman, Raymond Liu, Lei Yu, Thomas Brochhagen & Yang Xu. 2023. Frontiers in Communication. DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1136338
[supplementary material] [code repository]

Influence of Centrality on Communication Protocols in Communities of Deep Neural Agents
Jeanne Bruneau--Bongard & Thomas Brochhagen. 2023. Pre-registration.

When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks principle in colexification
Thomas Brochhagen & Gemma Boleda. 2022. Cognition. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105179
[pre-print] [supplementary material] [code repository] [video (45 minutes)]

Metonymy as a Universal Cognitive Phenomenon: Evidence from Multilingual Lexicons
Temuulen Khishigsuren, Gábor Bella, Thomas Brochhagen, Daariimaa Marav, Fausto Giunchiglia & Khuyagbaatar Batsuren. 2022. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022)
[repository] [video (5 minutes)]

Woman or tennis player? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variation in object naming
Eleonora Gualdoni, Thomas Brochhagen, Andreas Mädebach & Gemma Boleda. 2022. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022)
[repository]

Horse or pony? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variability in object naming
Eleonora Gualdoni, Thomas Brochhagen, Andreas Mädebach & Gemma Boleda. 2022. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2022). Vol. 5 , Article 26
[video (15 minutes)]

The interaction between cognitive ease and informativeness shapes the lexicons of natural languages
Thomas Brochhagen & Gemma Boleda. 2022. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2022). Vol. 5, Article 21

Brief at the risk of being misunderstood: Consolidating population- and individual-level tendencies
Thomas Brochhagen. 2021. Computational Brain & Behavior. DOI: 10.1007/s42113-021-00099-x
[code repository] [view-only version] [pre-print]

Game Theory in Pragmatics
Thomas Brochhagen. 2021. Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. Ed. Mark Aronoff. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0277

Modeling word interpretation with deep language models: The interaction between expectations and lexical information
Laura Aina, Thomas Brochhagen & Gemma Boleda. 2020. Proceedings of the 42th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020)
[code repository]

Deep daxes: Mutual exclusivity arises through both learning biases and pragmatic strategies in neural networks
Kristina Gulordava, Thomas Brochhagen & Gemma Boleda. 2020. Proceedings of the 42th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020)

Extremes are typical. A game theoretical derivation
Robert van Rooij & Thomas Brochhagen. 2020. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol. 7, p. 351-363. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-50200-3_16

Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use
Thomas Brochhagen, Michael Franke & Robert van Rooij. 2018. Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12681
[code repository]

Signaling under uncertainty
Thomas Brochhagen. 2018. PhD Thesis, University of Amsterdam

Signalling under Uncertainty: Interpretative Alignment without a Common Prior
Thomas Brochhagen. 2017. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. DOI: 10.1093/bjps/axx058

Effects of transmission perturbation in the cultural evolution of language
Thomas Brochhagen & Michael Franke. 2017. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017), pp. 1678-1683

Learning biases may prevent lexicalization of pragmatic inferences: a case study combining iterated (Bayesian) learning and functional selection
Thomas Brochhagen, Michael Franke & Robert van Rooij. 2016. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016), pp. 2081-2086

Improving Coordination on Novel Meaning through Context and Semantic Structure
Thomas Brochhagen. 2015. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning (CogACLL 2015), ACL, pp 74-82

Minimal Requirements for Productive Compositional Signaling
Thomas Brochhagen. 2015. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015), pp. 285-290

Diagnosing Truth, Interactive Sincerity, and Depictive Sincerity
Elizabeth Coppock & Thomas Brochhagen. 2013. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23 (SALT 23), pp. 358-375. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v23i0.2662

Raising and Resolving Issues with Scalar Modifiers
Elizabeth Coppock & Thomas Brochhagen. 2013. Semantics and Pragmatics, Volume 6, Article 3, pp. 1-57. DOI: 10.3765/sp.6.3

Only, At Least, At Most, More and Less
Thomas Brochhagen & Elizabeth Coppock. 2013. 87th annual LSA meeting

About

Since 2022, I'm a tenure-track professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra's Department of Translation and Language Sciences, where I'm a member of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory group. From the fall of 2019 to early 2022, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council project AMORE, A Distributional Model of Reference to Entities, also at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

From 2014 to 2018, I conducted doctoral research at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam. Within this period, I also spent time at the Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute in Edinburgh and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. My PhD research fellowship was awarded through ESSENCE, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network on the Evolution of Shared Semantics in Computational Environments.

Before moving to Amsterdam, I received a bachelor's and a master's in linguistics from the University of Düsseldorf. From 2011 to 2014, I was also a research assistant in the CRC 991 (Project B01: Verb frames at the syntax-semantics interface).

My name is pronounced [tʰɔmas bʁɔːχhagn], per Ripuarian pronounciation, or [toˈmas broxagen], per Chilean pronounciation. Feel free to mix, match, and create your own variant.