I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. I am also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. Previously, I was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University. Even before that, I was a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Dr. Paul Smolensky and Dr. Kyle Rawlins. My interests, broadly, are meaning and generalization in human and machine learners. I use computational and experimental linguistic methodologies to explore these areas. Please refer to the Publications section to find out more.

I have a new “For students” section for current and prospective students!

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Updates

• Forthcoming: I’ll be giving a keynote talk at Genbench @ EMNLP!
• Nov 2024: Gave an invited talk at UMass Amherst NLP on entity tracking.
• Oct 2024: Gave an invited talk at Harvard LangCog on neural network models as hypothesis generators.
• Oct 2024: Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution accepted to GenBench @ EMNLP (with Hayley Ross and Kate Davidson)!
• Sep 2024: Two papers accepted to EMNLP!
  • Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalization in Transformers (with Aditya Yedetore)
  • Personas as a Way to Model Truthfulness in Language Models (with Nitish Joshi, Javier Rando, Abulhair Saparov, and He He)
• Sep 2024: Gave an invited talk at the Emerging Generalization Settings Workshop at the Simons Institute on human and machine inductive biases for compositional linguistic generalization.
• Aug 2024: Preprint on neural network learners as hypothesis generators is out! Work with Kanishka Misra.
• June 2024: Hayley Ross presented Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional at ELM 3!
• May 2024: Preprint on code & entity tracking is out! Work with Sebastian Schuster and Shubham Toshniwal.
• May 2024: Gave an invited talk at the NSF New Horizons Workshop on Linguistic tests as unit tests and Mathematics Of Neuroscience and AI Convention on compositional generalization in neural networks.
• April 2024: Gave an invited talk at MIT CPL lab on using simulated learners for hypothesis generation.
• April 2024: My students Adi Yedetore and Hayley Ross presented their work at NENLP!
• March 2024: Gave an invited talk at Brown Linguistics on using simulated learners for hypothesis generation and a keynote talk at Scale-LLM Workshop on inverse scaling.

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Education / Professional experience

Current:

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Linguistics

Affiliated faculty, Dept. of Computer Science

Faculty Fellow, Center for Data Science

at Boston University

Visiting Faculty Researcher, Google

2021–2022:

Faculty Fellow, Center for Data Science, New York University

2021

Ph.D., Dept. of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University

May-Nov 2020

Research Intern, Google

Student Researcher, Google

Summer 2019

Research Intern, IBM research

2015–2016

Visiting researcher, NLP*CL Lab, School of Computing, KAIST

2015

M.St. General Linguistics & Comparative Philology
University of Oxford (Ertegun scholar)

2013–2014

Intern developer
Knowledge Extraction/NLP Team, NAVER Corporation

2013

B.A. English Linguistics & Literature
B.A. Linguistics with minor in Computer Science & Engineering
Seoul National University