Computational Linguist and Cognitive Scientist
Last modified: 11/12/24
2024 - now2019 - 20242017 - 2019201720162011-2017 PhD., Stanford University
2007-2011 B.A., The Johns Hopkins University
2023-2024 Consultant (NSF)
2022-2024 UW Linguistics Fund
2021-2022 UW Royalty Research Fund
2016-2017 Mellon Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2011-2016 Patrick Suppes Fellowship in Philosophy of Science
2007-2011 Hodson Trust Scholar
forthcoming Abhinav Patil, Jaap Jumelet, Yu Ying Chiu, Andy Lapastora, Peter Shen, Lexie Wang, Clevis Willrich, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Filtered Corpus Training (FiCT) Shows That Language Models Can Generalize from Indirect Evidence,” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (n.d.), http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15750.
forthcoming Philippe Schlenker, Camille Coye, Ambre Salis, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Lucie Ravaux, and Emmanuel Chemla “Anti-Babel: Three Degrees of Interspecies Comprehension,” Mind & Language (n.d.), https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007168.
2024 Nicolas Guerin, Emmanuel Chemla, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “The Impact of Syntactic and Semantic Proximity on Machine Translation with Back-Translation,” Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2024), https://openreview.net/forum?id=6DflIABPQP.
2024 Philippe Schlenker, Ambre Salis, Maël Leroux, Camille Coye, Luigi Rizzi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Emmanuel Chemla “Minimal Compositionality Versus Bird Implicatures: Two Theories of ABC-D Sequences in Japanese Tits,” Biological Reviews (2024), doi:10.1111/brv.13068.
2024 Toshiyuki Ogihara and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Limitations of a Modal Analysis of Before and After,” Semantics and Pragmatics 17, no. 1 (2024), doi:10.3765/sp.17.1.
2023 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Nathaniel Imel, and Qingxia Guo “A Semantic Universal for Modality,” Semantics & Pragmatics 16, no. 1 (2023), doi:10.3765/sp.16.1.
2023 Iris van de Pol, Paul Lodder, Leendert van Maanen, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Quantifiers Satisfying Semantic Universals Have Shorter Minimal Description Length,” Cognition 232 (2023): 105150, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105150.
2023 Sonia Ramotowska, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Leendert van Maanen, and Jakub Szymanik “Uncovering the Structure of Semantic Representations Using a Computational Model of Decision-Making,” Cognitive Science 47, no. 1 (2023): e13234, doi:10.1111/cogs.13234.
2022 Philippe Schlenker, Camille Coye, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Nathan Klinedinst, and Emmanuel Chemla “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Comparative Cognition: Recentering Animal Linguistics,” Cognitive Science 46, no. 12 (2022): e13220, doi:10.1111/cogs.13220.
2022 Milica Denić, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off,” Cognitive Science 46, no. 5 (2022): e13142, doi:10.1111/cogs.13142.
2022 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Explaining semantic typology, forms and all,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2022), doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.02.001.
2021 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Quantifiers in Natural Language: Efficient Communication and Degrees of Semantic Universals,” Entropy 23, no. 10 (2021): 1335, doi:10.3390/e23101335.
2021 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Philippe Schlenker, and Emmanuel Chemla “Referential and General Calls in Primate Semantics,” Linguistics and Philosophy 44, no. 6 (2021): 1317–1342, doi:10.1007/s10988-021-09322-1.
2021 Fausto Carcassi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning,” Cognitive Science 45, no. 8 (2021): e13027, doi:10.1111/cogs.13027.
2021 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld “How Social Networks Affect the Repression-Dissent Puzzle,” PLOS ONE 16, no. 5 (2021): e0250784, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0250784.
2020 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Jakub Szymanik “Ease of Learning Explains Semantic Universals,” Cognition 195 (2020): 104076, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104076.
2020 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Toward the Emergence of Nontrivial Compositionality,” Philosophy of Science 87, no. 5 (2020): 897–909, doi:10.1086/710628.
2020 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “An Explanation of the Veridical Uniformity Universal,” Journal of Semantics 37, no. 1 (2020): 129–144, doi:10.1093/jos/ffz019.
2020 Peter Hawke and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Semantic Expressivism for Epistemic Modals,” Linguistics and Philosophy 44, no. 2 (2021): 475–511, doi:10.1007/s10988-020-09295-7.
2019 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Jakub Szymanik “Learnability and Semantic Universals,” Semantics & Pragmatics 12, no. 4 (2019), doi:10.3765/sp.12.4.
2016/2018 Peter Hawke and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Informational Dynamics of Epistemic Possibility Modals,” Synthese 195, no. 10 (2018): 4309–4342, doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1216-8.
2016 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Compositional Signaling in a Complex World,” Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25, no. 3 (2016): 379–397, doi:10.1007/s10849-016-9236-9.
2016 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Compositionality and Competition in Monkey Alert Calls,” Theoretical Linguistics 42, no. 1–2 (2016): 159–171, doi:10.1515/tl-2016-0009.
2016 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Some Properties of Iterated Languages,” Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25, no. 2 (2016): 191–213, doi:10.1007/s10849-016-9239-6.
2013/2016 Grigori Mints and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “ADC Method of Proof Search in Intuitionistic Propositional Natural Deduction,” Journal of Logic and Computation 26, no. 1 (2016): 395–408, doi:10.1093/logcom/ext032.
2013 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Thomas F. Icard III. “Iterating Semantic Automata,” Linguistics and Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2013): 151–173, doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9132-6.
2012 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Siamak Ardekani, J.L.V. Jose LV Mejino, Landon T L.T. Detwiler, J.F. James F Brinkley, Michael Halle, Ron Kikinis, Raimond L R.L. Winslow, M.I. Michael I Miller, and J.T. Tilak Ratnanather “Ontological Labels for Automated Location of Anatomical Shape Differences,” Journal of Biomedical Informatics 45, no. 3 (2012): 522–527, doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2012.02.013.
(NB: An * next to the year indicates abstract, as opposed to full paper, review.)
2024 C. M. Downey, Terra Blevins, Dhwani Serai, Dwija Parikh, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-Resource Language Families,” in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, ed. Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, and Yun-Nung Chen (Miami, Florida, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024), 15647–15663, https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.918.
2024 Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro, Andrew Hedding, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Iconic Artificial Language Learning in the Field: An Experiment with San Martín Peras Mixtec Speakers,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 46, 2024, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ds5n1qs.
2023 C.m. Downey, Terra Blevins, Nora Goldfine, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Embedding Structure Matters: Comparing Methods to Adapt Multilingual Vocabularies to New Languages,” in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multi-Lingual Representation Learning (MRL), ed. Duygu Ataman (Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023), 268–281, https://aclanthology.org/2023.mrl-1.20.
2023 C.m. Downey, Xuhui Zhou, Zeyu Liu, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Learning to Translate by Learning to Communicate,” in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multi-Lingual Representation Learning (MRL), ed. Duygu Ataman (Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023), 218–238, https://aclanthology.org/2023.mrl-1.17.
2023 Shunjie Wang and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Evaluating Transformer’s Ability to Learn Mildly Context-Sensitive Languages,” in Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, ed. Yonatan Belinkov, Sophie Hao, Jaap Jumelet, Najoung Kim, Arya McCarthy, and Hosein Mohebbi (Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023), 271–283, https://aclanthology.org/2023.blackboxnlp-1.21.
2023 Amélie Reymond and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “mSCAN: A Dataset for Multilingual Compositional Generalisation Evaluation,” in Proceedings of the 1st GenBench Workshop on (Benchmarking) Generalisation in NLP, ed. Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Koustuv Sinha, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Ryan Cotterell, and Elia Bruni (Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023), 143–151, https://aclanthology.org/2023.genbench-1.11.
2023 Leroy Zhifei Wang and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “GQG: Generalized Quantifier Generalization - A Dataset for Evaluating Quantifier Semantics Understanding in Language Models,” in Proceedings of the 1st GenBench Workshop on (Benchmarking) Generalisation in NLP, ed. Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Koustuv Sinha, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Ryan Cotterell, and Elia Bruni (Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023), 185–192, https://aclanthology.org/2023.genbench-1.15.
2023 Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Iconic Artificial Language Learning: A Conceptual Replication with English Speakers,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023.
2022 David K Yi, James V Bruno, Jiayu Han, Peter Zukerman, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-Trained Language Models,” in Proceedings of the Fifth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2022, https://openreview.net/forum?id=Fmn3YQmUPYZ.
2022 Pangbo Ban, Yifan Jiang, Tianran Liu, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Testing Pre-Trained Language Models’ Understanding of Distributivity via Causal Mediation Analysis,” in Proceedings of the Fifth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2022, https://openreview.net/forum?id=D3U5fpVsZIN.
2022* Nathaniel Imel and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Modal Semantic Universals Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off,” in Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 32), 2022, 227–248, doi:10.3765/salt.v1i0.5346.
2022 Qingxia Guo, Nathaniel Imel, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “A Database for Modal Semantic Typology,” in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (Seattle, Washington: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022), 42–51, doi:10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.6.
2022 C.m. Downey, Fei Xia, Gina-Anne Levow, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “A Masked Segmental Language Model for Unsupervised Natural Language Segmentation,” in Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology (Seattle, Washington: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022), 39–50, https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigmorphon-1.5.
2022 Chih-chan Tien and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Bilingual Alignment Transfers to Multilingual Alignment for Unsupervised Parallel Text Mining,” in Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Dublin, Ireland: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022), 8696–8706, https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.595.
2022 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Xuhui Zhou, Zeyu Liu, and C. M. Downey “Emergent Communication Fine-Tuning (EC-FT) for Pretrained Language Models,” in Emergent Communication Workshop at ICLR 2022, 2022, https://openreview.net/forum?id=SUqrM7WR7W5.
2021 Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro, Amandalynne Paullada, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “A Multilabel Approach to Morphosyntactic Probing,” in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021 (Punta Cana, Dominican Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021), 4486–4524, doi:10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.382.
2021 Jaap Jumelet, Milica Denic, Jakub Szymanik, Dieuwke Hupkes, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Language Models Use Monotonicity to Assess NPI Licensing,” in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021), 4958–4969, doi:10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.439.
2021 Iris van de Pol, Paul Lodder, Leendert van Maanen, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Quantifiers Satisfying Semantic Universals Are Simpler,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43, no. 43 (2021), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vm445rp.
2020 Chuanrong Li, Lin Shengshuo, Zeyu Liu, Xinyi Wu, Xuhui Zhou, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Linguistically-Informed Transformations (LIT): A Method for Automatically Generating Contrast Sets,” in Proceedings of the Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2020), 126–135, doi:10.18653/v1/2020.blackboxnlp-1.12.
2020 Nur Geffen Lan, Emmanuel Chemla, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “On the Spontaneous Emergence of Discrete and Compositional Signals,” in Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2020), 4794–4800, doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.433.
2020* Milica Denić, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Complexity/Informativeness Trade-Off in the Domain of Indefinite Pronouns,” in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30), vol. 30, 2020, 166–184, doi:10.3765/salt.v30i0.4811.
2020* Sonia Ramotowska, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Leendert Van Maanen, and Jakub Szymanik “Most, but Not More Than Half, Is Proportion-Dependent and Sensitive to Individual Differences,” Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 24, no. 2 (2020): 165–182, doi:10.18148/sub/2020.v24i2.891.
2019* Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Quantifiers in Natural Language Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off,” in Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. Julian J Schlöder, Dean McHugh, and Floris Roelofsen, 2019, 513–522.
2019 Fausto Carcassi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “The Emergence of Monotone Quantifiers via Iterated Learning,” in Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019), 2019, 190–196, https://psyarxiv.com/8swtd.
2019 Iris van de Pol, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, and Jakub Szymanik “Complexity and Learnability in the Explanation of Semantic Universals of Quantifiers,” in Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019), 2019, 3015–3021, https://psyarxiv.com/f8dbp/.
2019 Lewis O’Sullivan and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Neural Models of the Psychosemantics of ‘Most’,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019), 140–151, doi:10.18653/v1/W19-2916.
2018 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Paying Attention to Function Words,” in Emergent Communication Workshop @ NeurIPS 2018, 2018, http://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11060.
2018 Sandro Pezzelle, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Raffaella Bernardi, and Jakub Szymanik “Some of Them Can Be Guessed! Exploring the Effect of Linguistic Context in Predicting Quantifiers,” in Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (Melbourne, Australia: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018), 114–119, doi:10.18653/v1/P18-2019.
2017* Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Uniform Definability in Assertability Semantics,” in Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. Alexandre Cremers, Thom van Gessel, and Floris Roelofsen, 2017, 445–454.
2015 Peter Hawke and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Informational Dynamics of ‘Might’ Assertions,” in Logic, Rationality, and Interaction, ed. Wiebe van der Hoek, Wesley H. Holliday, and Wen-fang Wang, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 143–155, doi:10.1007/978-3-662-48561-3_12.
2015* Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Gert-Jan Munneke, and Jakub Szymanik “Alternative Representations in Formal Semantics: A Case Study of Quantifiers,” in Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. Thomas Brochhagen, Floris Roelofsen, and Nadine Thelier, 2015, 368–378.
2014 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “On the Decidability of Iterated Languages,” in Proceedings of Philosophy, Mathematics, Linguistics: Aspects of Interaction (PhML2014), ed. Oleg Prosorov, 2014, 215–224.
2013 Jakub Szymanik, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Marcin Zajenkowski, and Thomas F. Icard III. “Automata and Complexity in Multiple-Quantifier Sentence Verification,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 2013.
2011 S. Steinert-Threlkeld, S. Ardekani, J.L.V. Mejinoz, L.T. Detwilerz, J.F. Brinkleyz, M. Halle, R. Kikinis, R.L. Winslowy, M.I. Miller, and J.T. Ratnanather “Ontological Labels for Automated Location of Left Ventricular Remodeling,” in Proceedings - 5th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, ICSC 2011, 2011, doi:10.1109/ICSC.2011.99.
2017 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Communication and Computation: New Questions About Compositionality” (PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2017), https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/document/12050.
2011 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Lambda Calculi,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011), http://www.iep.utm.edu/lambda-calculi/.
2009 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, J. Tilak Ratnanather, and Tilak Ratnanather “Open Standards, Web-Based Mathlets: Making Interactive Tutorials Using the Html5 Canvas Element,” Loci: Developers 1 (2009), doi:10.4169/loci003340.
under contract Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Szymanik, Jakub Computational Explanations of Semantic Universals, Cambridge Elements in Semantics and Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, n.d.).
01/24/2025 Workshop on self-assembling games
11/29/2024 Workshop: At the Crossroads of AI and Cognitive Science
10/18/2024 Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS 55)
06/01/2024 Workshop in honor of Johan van Benthem’s 75th birthday
04/18/2024 University of Toronto Computational Linguistics Colloquium
03/11/2024 Edinburgh Center for Language Evolution
12/08/2023 UMass Amherst Linguistics Colloquium
09/29/2023 Ohio State Linguistics Colloquium
10/18/2023 Computational approaches to language typology and evolution
08/04/2023 Internal and external pressures shaping language
05/01/23 UC Davis Linguistics Colloquium
03/17/23 Inaugural MIT Breakstone Speakers Series on Language, Mind, and Computation
02/28/23 UC Irvine Language Science Colloquium
12/06/22 McDonell Foundation Workshop on The Nature and Origins of the Human Capacity for Abstract Combinatorial Thought
09/22/22 South by Semantics Workshop (SXSW) @ University of Texas
03/30/2022 Center for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP) @ Gothenburg
03/04/2022 Allyson Ettinger lab @ Chicago
09/21/22 Computational Linguistics Seminar @ University of Texas
05/19/2022 Cognitive Semantics and Quantities closing workshop
09/08/2021 Computational Psycholinguistics Lab @ MIT (PI: Levy)
06/17/2021 Konstanz Philosophy Colloquium
02/17/2021 Language Change: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (@ Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
10/01/2020 Computation and Langauge Lab @ Berkeley (PI: Piantadosi)
02/22/2021 Montana State University Computer Science Colloquium
06/12/2019 Workshop in Honor of Johan van Benthem’s 70th Birthday
05/24/2019 Social Models of Meaning Acquisition (U Warsaw)
04/17/2019 Universität Osnabrück Institute of Cognitive Science Colloquium
04/05/2019 AwesomeIT Symposium (U Amsterdam)
03/07/2019 Logic and Interactive Rationality Seminar (ILLC, Amsterdam)
02/20/2019 University of Washington Linguistics Colloquium
01/24/2019 Cornell University Linguistics Colloquium
12/15/2018 Workshop on Universals in the Modal Domain (Utrecht)
09/10/2018 Cognition, Language and Communication Seminar (Amsterdam)
11/14/2017 Computational Linguistics Seminar (Amsterdam)
11/10/2017 Paris-Amsterdam-London Meeting
09/28/2017 Cognitive Semantics and Quantities kick-off workshop
06/26/2017 Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary (with Peter Hawke)
03/22/2017 Institut Jean Nicod
12/11/2015 Center for Logic, Language, and Mind (Stockholm University)
12/10/2015 Higher Seminar in Theoretical Philosophy (Stockholm University)
05/31/2015 Fourth CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Intelligent Interaction
04/14/2015 Stanford Mathematical Logic Seminar
12/11/2013 Knowledge, Argumentation and Games in Amsterdam
01/09/2014 Cognition and Language Workshop
05/14/2013 Stanford Mathematical Logic Seminar
06/02/2012 First CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Intelligent Interaction
01/26/2024 North East Linguistics Society (NELS 52); with Wataru Uegaki, Anne Mucha, Nathaniel Imel
07/xx/2023 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 44); with Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro
04/21/2023 Workshop on Modality in Underdescribed Languages: Methods and Insights; with Sharon Hargus and Virginia Beavert
12/08/2022 Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP 5, at EMNLP); with Pangbo Ban, Yifan Jiang, Tianran Liu
12/08/2022 Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP 5, at EMNLP); with David K Yi, James V Bruno, Jiayu Han, Peter Zukerman
06/10/2022 Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 32); with Nathaniel Imel
05/20/2022 Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM 32); with Nathaniel Imel
07/14/2022 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP at NAACL; with Qingxia Guo, Nathaniel Imel
07/14/2022 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology at NAACL; with C.M. Downey, Fei Xia, Gina-Anne Levow
05/23/2022 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); with Chih-chan Tien
04/29/2022 Workshop on Emergent Communication: New Frontiers at ICLR; with C.M. Downey, Zeyu Liu, Xuhui Zhou
11/20/2020 Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP); with Chuanrong Li, Lin Shengshuo, Zeyu Liu, Xinyi Wu, Xuhui Zhou
08/18/2020 Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30); online, with Milica Denic
07/30/2020 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 43); with Iris van de Pol, Paul Lodder, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik
07/07/2020 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020); online, with Nur Lan and Emmanuel Chemla
12/18/2019 Amsterdam Colloquium (AC 2019)
09/06/2019 Sinn und Bedeutung 24; with Sonia Ramotowska, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik
07/27/2019 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSc 41); with Fausto Carcassi, Jakub Szymanik
07/27/2019 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSc 41); with Iris van de Pol, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik
06/22/2019 Bilateral Approaches to Meaning; with Peter Hawke
06/07/2019 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL); with Lewis O’Sullivan
04/03/2019 Reasoning, Argumentation and Logic in Natural Language: Experiments and Models; with Sonia Ramotowska, Leendert van Maanen, and Jakub Szymanik
12/08/2018 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2018), workshop on Emergent Communication
11/04/2018 Philosophy of Science Association, symposium on Evolutionary Explanations of Compositional Communication
03/29/2018 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; with Peter Hawke
12/22/2017 Amsterdam Colloquium (AC 2017)
12/17/2015 Amsterdam Colloquium (AC 2015); with Gert-Jan Munneke, Jakub Szymanik
10/17/2015 Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification; with Gert-Jan Munneke, Jakub Szymanik
05/02/2015 Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy; with Peter Hawke
04/25/2014 Philosophy, Mathematics, Linguistics: Aspects of Interaction (PhML 2014)
10/11/2013 California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Conference (CUSP 6); with Eric Acton and Daria Popova
04/26/2013 Berkley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy
09/21/2011 Fifth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
2023 “Google’s Bard Writes Convincingly About Known Conspiracy Theories” by Davey Alba in Bloomberg
2023 “Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.” by Drew Harwell in The Washington Post
LING 571 Deep Processing Methods for NLP: Aut ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22, ’23, ’24
LING 572 Advanced Statistical Methods for NLP: Win ’20
LING 574 Deep Learning for NLP (new course development): Spr ’21, ’22, ’24
LING 575 Analyzing Neural Language Models: Win ’20, Spr ’21, ’22
LING 575 Compositionality and Generalization: Spr ’24
Causality, Decisions, and Games (with Robert van Rooij)
Neural Network Methods for Quantifiers
PHIL 152 Computability and Logic
PHIL 23A Cognitive Science of Mathematics
PHIL 150e Logic in Action (with Thomas Icard and Peter Hawke)
The Artificial Language Toolkit: MIT Linguistics March 15-16 2023
Learnability of Quantifiers (with Jakub Szymanik): ESSLLI 2019; NASSLLI 2022
Quantification and Computation (with Jakub Szymanik): ESSLLI 2014
Primary Advisor
Graduated PhD Students (as primary advisor)
Committee Member
Graduate Student Representative (external member)
2024 Abhinav Patil, “Language Models can Generalize from Indirect Evidence: Evidence from Filtered Corpus Training (FICT)”
2023 Yifan Jiang (PhD student, Computer Science @ Waterloo), “The Weighted Mobius Score: A Unified Framework for Feature Attribution”
2022 Meheresh Yeditha (Software Engineer @ Rippling), “An Investigation Into Supervision for Seq2Seq Techniques for Natural Language to Code Translation”
2022 Nathaniel Imel (PhD Student, Logic and Philosophy of Science @ UC Irvine), “Modals in natural language optimize the simplicity/informativeness tradeoff”
2022 Katya Simpson (Software Engineer @ Twitter), " “Obama never said that”: Evaluating fact-checks for topical consistency and quality"
2021 Megan Barnes (Software Engineer @ Google), “Latent Compositional Representations for English Function Word Comprehension”
2021 Jessica Sweeney (Data Scientist @ Coastal Community Bank), “Comparing Methods for Automatic Identification of Mislabeled Data”
2021 Shunjie Wang (Data Scientist AI/NLP @ Happify Health), “Evaluating Transformer’s Ability to Learn Mildly Context-Sensitive Languages”
2021 Wes Rose (Language Engineer @ Amazon), “Toward the Emergence of Quantifiers”
2021 Devin Johnson (PhD student, Linguistics @ Northwestern), “Semantic Universals in Bayesian Learning of Quantifiers”
2020 Benny Longwill (Research Engineer @ ETS), “The Suitability of Generative Adversarial Training for BERT Natural Language Generation”
2020 Chih-chan Tien (PhD student, CS @ Chicago), “Bilingual alignment transfers to multilingual alignment for unsupervised parallel text mining”
2020 Daniel Campos (PhD student, CS @ UIUC), “Explorations In Curriculum Learning Methods For Training Language Models”
2020 Paige Finkelstein (Software Engineer, turn.io), “Human-Assisted Neural Machine Translation: Harnessing Human Feed- back for Machine Translation”
Semantics & Pragmatics (5); Glossa Psycholinguistics; The Psychological Review; Mind; Noûs; Mind & Language (2); Journal of Data Science; Erkenntnis (3); Synthese (2); The Review of Symbolic Logic (2); Journal of Logic, Language and Information (4); Journal of Semantics (4); Australasion Journal of Philosophy; Ergo; Philosophical Studies; Interaction Studies (formerly known as Evolution of Communication); Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence; Frontiers in Psychology (Language Sciences); Theoria (2); Logic Journal of the IGPL; PLoS Computational Biology; Open Mind; Journal of Pragmatics; Journal of Memory and Language
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP); International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR); Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT); North American ACL (NAACL); *SEM (Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics); Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS); Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM); BlackboxNLP; West Coast NLP (WeCNLP); International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML); COLING; Semantics and Philosophy in Europe (SPE); Amsterdam Colloquium; Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society; AACL-IJCNLP (Asia-Pacific ACL - International Joint Conference in NLP); Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE); Experimental approaches to language universals in structure and meaning; Approaches to implicature: rational choice and/or exhaustification; WeSSLLI (Web Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) Student Session; ACL Student Research Workshop; GenBench Workshop
The MIT Press; Cambridge University Press
National Science Foundation; UW Royalty Research Fund; UW Linguistics Fund
Regular participant in Pop-Up Mentoring Program (PUMP) for LSA events (e.g. SALT, NASSLLI)