Bio

Can we use computational modeling to inform our understanding of semantics, pragmatics and social science ? I think the answer is yes.

I completed my Ph.D at The University of Texas at Austin, working with Jessy Li and David Beaver as my primary advisors. My dissertation focused on the intergroup bias in online communication — what are the linguistic properties that characterize and distinguish in-group speech from out-group speech, and what can we learn about these properties using machine learning?

Ph.D. Dissertation: Modeling Intergroup Bias in Online Conversation. The University of Texas at Austin, May 2024. [pdf] [bib] [source]

I completed my Masters at the University of Rochester, where I worked in the Formal and Computational Semantics Lab with Aaron Steven White. My research focused on the wide breadth of generalizations available across predicates and arguments in English.

Links

★ google scholar ★ semantic scholar ★

Select Papers

You can view a list of all of my papers on this page. The papers below are representative of my work and current research interests.

• “Do they mean ‘us’? Interpreting Referring Expressions in Intergroup Bias” (Nov 2024). In Findings of The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
  [pdf] [bib] [code] [poster]

• “Lil-Bevo: Explorations of Strategies for Training Language Models in More Humanlike Ways” (Dec. 2023). In Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning.
  [pdf] [bib] [code] [models]

• “How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias and Emotion” (May 2023). In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
  [pdf] [bib] [data+code] [poster] [slides] [talk]

• “Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice” (November 2020). In Proceedings of The 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
  [pdf] [bib] [data+code] [slides] [talk]

• “Decomposing Generalization: Models of Generic, Habitual, and Episodic Statements” (2019). In Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 7. 501–517.
  [pdf] [bib] [data+code] [slides]

Academic job search

I navigated the academic job market over Fall 2023 and Spring 2024. I’ve put up all my job materials, as well as the slides from my job talks on GitHub. I hope it helps you if you too decide to pursue a career in academia.