Hi! I’m Jérôme Botoko Ekila, a final-year PhD student in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), advised by Prof. dr. Paul Van Eecke and Prof. dr. Katrien Beuls.
My research explores emergent communication through language games, multi-agent reinforcement learning, usage-based linguistics and neuro-symbolic AI. I pursue these questions as part of the HERMES programme, which studies how machines can bootstrap their own languages and adapt them to the tasks and environments they encounter.
I’ve been fortunate to work with Prof. dr. Nicolas Bredeche and dr. Leo Cazenille at Sorbonne Université in Paris on emergent communication and swarm robotics.
Alongside my research, I serve as a TA for four courses: two in natural language processing (NLP), one introductory course in computational linguistics and one in numerical analysis.
Beyond academia, I enjoy playing ultimate frisbee 🥏 and running 🏃🏼.
You can find my publications on the Publications page and view my full CV.
Selected Publications
Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale
Botoko Ekila, J., Verheyen, L., Nevens, J., Beuls, K. & Van Eecke, P. (2026). Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 14, 2234–2257.
Cultural Evolution Drives the Emergence of Conventions in Neural Emergent Communication
Toquebiau, M., Botoko Ekila, J., Beuls, K. & Van Eecke, P. (Accepted). In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026).
Language Games Meet Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study for the Naming Game
Van Eecke, P., Beuls, K., Botoko Ekila, J. & Rădulescu, R. (2022). Journal of Language Evolution, 7(2), 213–223.
📰 News
- 2026-10 — Co-organising the ELA Symposium in Paris!
- 2026-10 — We’ll present our latest TACL paper this month at EMNLP 2026 and BNAIC 2026!
- 2026-09 — Co-organising this year’s CLIN 36 (Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands)!
- 2026-08 — Our paper on cultural evolution and neural emergent communication was accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main)!
- 2026-08 — Our paper on scaling decentralised language games with bidirectional agents was just published in TACL!
- 2026-07 — New paper on the importance of conventionality was published in the Journal of Language Evolution.
- 2025-11 — Visiting for the next three months Prof. Nicolas Bredeche’s lab at Sorbonne Université’s ISIR to study language evolution with robot swarms.
- 2025-09 — Our paper “Constructions All the Way Up” was published and presented at CxGs+NLP (and presented at CLIN 35!)
- 2025-07 — Received two FWO mobility grants.
- 2025-05 — Our full-length journal paper on neuro-symbolic procedural semantics was published in PLOS One!
- 2025-03 — Invited talk on emergent communication at ISIR, Sorbonne Université, Paris.
- 2024-05 — Presented our work on emergent linguistic conventions at AAMAS.
- 2024-05 — Received an IFAAMAS student scholarship.
- 2023-11 — Presented our “language game meets multi-agent RL” at BNAIC.
- 2023-10 — Co-authored a paper at ECAI paper on neuro-symbolic AI and procedural semantics!
- 2023-09 — Presented our work on language games at CLIN 33!
- 2022-07 — Joint work on “language games and multi-agent RL” was published in the Journal of Language Evolution!