Thomas Brochhagen
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
My research asks why languages are the way they are, how they came to be this way, and what this tells us about their users. I study evolution and change in the languages and linguistic capabilities of humans, non-human animals, and machines.
I'm a tenure-track professor & Ramón y Cajal fellow 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
Norma, ús i interferència: biaixos lingüístics en els models de llenguatge en català
[code repository]
[PDF (CAT)]
Assessing Pressures Shaping Natural Language Lexica
[pre-print]
[code repository]
The interaction of meaning similarity and confusability explains regularity in form-meaning mappings at and below the word level
[pre-print]
[code repository]
The plus and minus of bonobo call combinations
[code repository]
[PDF (lingbuzz)]
The role of referent predictability in pronoun production: Insights from a Bayesian meta-analysis
[pre-print]
[code repository]
From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity
[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
[code repository]
[demo 1]
[demo 2]
A computational analysis of crosslinguistic regularity in semantic change
[supplementary material]
[code repository]
Influence of Centrality on Communication Protocols in Communities of Deep Neural Agents
When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks principle in colexification
[pre-print]
[supplementary material]
[code repository]
[video (45 minutes)]
Metonymy as a Universal Cognitive Phenomenon: Evidence from Multilingual Lexicons
[repository]
[video (5 minutes)]
Woman or tennis player? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variation in object naming
[repository]
Horse or pony? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variability in object naming
[video (15 minutes)]
The interaction between cognitive ease and informativeness shapes the lexicons of natural languages
Brief at the risk of being misunderstood: Consolidating population- and individual-level tendencies
[code repository]
[view-only version]
[pre-print]
Modeling word interpretation with deep language models: The interaction between expectations and lexical information
[code repository]
Extremes are typical. A game theoretical derivation
Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use
[code repository]
Signalling under Uncertainty: Interpretative Alignment without a Common Prior
Effects of transmission perturbation in the cultural evolution of language
Improving Coordination on Novel Meaning through Context and Semantic Structure
Minimal Requirements for Productive Compositional Signaling
Diagnosing Truth, Interactive Sincerity, and Depictive Sincerity
Raising and Resolving Issues with Scalar Modifiers
Only, At Least, At Most, More and Less
Lab
We study linguistic emergence, change, diversity, and evolution at the UPF's Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory group.
PhD researchers I currently (co-)supervise:
- Yulia Yakubenkova studies ecological and social drivers of vocal learning (with Dan Dediu)
- Jeanne Bruneau-–Bongard studies evolution and regularity in meaning (with Emmanuel Chemla)
- Marta Garcia-Casado studies semantic change through language models (with Elisenda Bernal)
- Kebed Zagidov studies & develops language resources for Avar
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 principal investigator in the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory group. Starting 2025 I'm also a Ramón y Cajal fellow.
In between 2019 and 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.