Frank Mollica

Frank Mollica

Lecturer in Computational Cognitive Science

University of Melbourne / University of Edinburgh


I am a Lecturer in Computational Cognitive Science at the Complex Human Data Hub, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, an Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh and an associate member of the Center for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh.

My research uses computational and experimental techniques to investigate how children and adults construct rich conceptual systems that support everyday cognition and how these conceptual systems interface with language. I am also interested in characterizing the cognitive efficiency, diversity, evolution and transmission of these conceptual systems. A second strand of my research uses experimental methods and information theoretic models of language-processing to investigate how we actively build representations of context and how these contexts influence semantic and pragmatic computations.

Recent Publications

(2024). Even laypeople use legalese. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

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(2024). What can L1 speakers tell us about *killing hope*? A novel behavioral measure for identifying collocations. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). A note on complexity in efficient communication analyses of semantic typology. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Even Laypeople Use Legalese. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Information-theoretic and machine learning methods for semantic categorization. The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution.