I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and an Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. I was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google DeepMind until very recently. Before that, I was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University and 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.

The new lab website is live, check it out here!

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Updates

• May 2026: Gave a talk titled Language models for language sciences at Stanford NLP. Slides here.

• May 2026: Do Language Models Track Entities Across State Changes? has been accepted to ICML 2026! Work with Peter Tang, Qiao Zhao, Gabriel Franco, Derry Wijaya, Aaron Mueller, and Sebastian Schuster.

• April 2026: RExBench has been accepted to ACL 2026! Work with Nicholas Edwards, Yukyung Lee, Audrey Mao, Yulu Qin, and Sebastian Schuster.

• April 2026: Are they lovers or friends? has been accepted to ACL 2026! Collaboration with KAIST team and Seza :)

• April 2026: “Does Episodic Memory Help Close the Lexical Frequency Gap in Sensitivity to Syntactic Contrasts? A Test Using Retrieval-Augmented Language Models” has been accepted to CogSci 2026! Work with Jing Liu.

• March 2026: Presented “(How) Do Language Models Track Entities Across State Changes?” at MassMutual (work with Peter Tang, Qiao Zhao, Gabriel Franco, Derry Wijaya, Aaron Mueller, and Sebastian Schuster).

• March 2026: Was at Brandeis CL/NLP for a panel discussion.

• January 2026: Presented “Classical Computation in Connectionist Models” at IVADO (work with Aditya Yedetore).

• January 2026: Death of the Novel(ty): Beyond n-Gram Novelty as a Metric for Textual Creativity has been accepted to ICLR 2026! Work with Arkadiy Saakyan, Smaranda Muresan, and Tuhin Chakrabarty.

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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