Jakub Szymanik

Computation, Language & Thought Lab

Output of ERC grant Cognitive Semantics and Quantities summing up much of my research between 2016- 2022.

me

I am an Associate Professor at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CiMeC) and the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento. Before joining CiMeC through a direct call in 2022, I held the same position at the University of Amsterdam (2013–2022), where I led research projects at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. I hold the Italian National Scientific Qualification as a Full Professor in Linguistics (10/G1) and as an Associate Professor in Computer Science (INF01). My lab studies how human and artificial minds represent meaning, learn concepts, and reason about the world.

Computation, Language & Thought

The Computation, Language, and Thought Lab (CoLT Lab) studies the computational principles underlying human and artificial cognition. We investigate how concepts and meanings are represented, learned, and used in reasoning, treating language as a privileged window onto the structure of thought.

Our research combines formal methods from logic, computer science, and information theory with behavioral experiments, corpus analyses, computational simulations, and machine learning. By integrating these approaches, we develop mathematically rigorous theories of cognition and ask why particular patterns of meaning and reasoning emerge systematically across individuals, cultures, and languages.

A central goal of the lab is to understand the relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence. We use computational models and large language models (LLMs) as tools to test theories of representation, learning, and reasoning, and to study the cognitive mechanisms that distinguish human intelligence from current AI systems.

Recent representative papers

(More papers are listed in Papers and probably on Google Scholar)

  1. Sonia Ramotowska,  Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik. Adult learning of a novel quantifier tracks semantic universals. Cognition, 2026. 
  2. Alexandra Sarafoglou, Anne Giacobello, Henrik R. Godmann, Tamar Johnson, Ingmar Visser, Julia M. Haaf, and Jakub Szymanik. Are semantic representations stable? A Bayesian framework applied to the study of quantifier meaning. Computational Brain and Behavior, 2026.
  3. Leonardo Bertolazzi, Manuel Vargas Guzmán, Raffaella Bernardi, Maciej Malicki, Jakub Szymanik. Teaching Small Language Models to Learn Logic through Meta-Learning. Proceedings of the European Association of Computational Linguistics, 2026. 
  4. Milica Denić and Jakub Szymanik. Recursive Numeral Systems Optimize the Trade-off Between Lexicon Size and Average Morphosyntactic Complexity. Cognitive Science, 2024.
  5. Jakub Szymanik, Arnold Kochari, Heming Strømholt Bremnes. Questions About Quantifiers: Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Quantity Processing by the Brain. Cognitive Science, 2023
  6. Fausto Carcassi and Jakub Szymanik. The Boolean Language of Thought is recoverable from learning data. Cognition, 239, 2023.
  7. Iris van de Pol, Paul Lodder, Leendert van Maanen, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Jakub Szymanik. Quantifiers satisfying semantic universals have shorter minimal description length. Cognition, 2023.
  8. Fausto Carcassi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik. Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning. Cognitive Science, 45 (8), 2021.
  9. S. Steinert-Threlkeld and J. Szymanik. Ease of Learning Explains Semantic Universals, Cognition, vol 195, 2020.
  10. Jakub Szymanik. Quantifiers and Cognition. Logical and Computational Perspectives, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Springer, 2016.
Past and current group members

People: Greta Gaimarri (PhD CiMeC), Manuel Vargas Guzmán (PhD Warsaw)

Alumni -where they are now: Tamar Johnson (postdoc in Amsterdam), Alexandra Sarafoglou (professor in Amsterdam), Heming Strømholt Bremnes (postdoc in Trondheim), Maria Boritchev (researcher at Orange Labs), Sonia Ramotowska (postdoc in Paris), Milica Denić (professor in Geneva), Kim Archambeau (now ULB Brussels), Fausto Carcassi (professor in Amsterdam), Witold Kieraś (researcher in Warsaw), Dorota Komosińska (researcher in Warsaw), Arnold Kochari (researcher in Stockholm), Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (professor in Seattle).

Funding

The lab’s work has been supported by major competitive funding from national and international agencies, including an ERC Starting Grant (European Research Council), a personal VENI award (Dutch Research Council, NWO), a personal postdoctoral fellowship from the Swedish Research Council, and numerous projects funded by NWO, the Polish National Science Centre (NCN), Amsterdam Brain & Cognition, and the University of Trento. These projects span computational cognitive science, semantics, reasoning and communication, language learning, semantic universals, and the study of human and artificial intelligence

Service

Member of CiMeC Governing Board (Giunta), Chair of the Standing Committee of the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information. Member of the Governing Board of the Association for Logic, Language, and Information, Associate Editor of Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Council Member for the Center for Research on Culture, Language, and Mind; Member of the Neurocognitive Science Section of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Member/chair of the grant panels for Polish National Science Center.

Collaboration

The lab collaborates with researchers and institutions worldwide, including: University of Amsterdam, University of Warsaw, University of Washington, Utrecht University, University of Groningen, ENS Paris, University of Tübingen, NTNU Trondheim, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and others. 

Full CV