I am a Computational Cognitive Scientist and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colgate University where I run the Computational Language Processing (CLaP) lab. Prior to this, I was a PhD student in the department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University where I was primarily advised by Tal Linzen.
At a broad level I am interested in how humans and AI systems represent and process sentences. When studying human sentence processing, I use computational models to generate quantitative behavioural predictions from theories in (psycho)linguistics and then test these predictions using a variety of experimental paradigms. When studying sentence processing in AI systems, I draw on insights and methods from Linguistics and Psychology to generate and test hypotheses about the properties of sentences these systems encode and how they use these properties when performing some task. You can read more about this work on the Publications page.
Outside of my direct research interests, I enjoy playing around with analyzing and visualizing different kinds of data. I also care about open science, replicability and making computational tools accessible to people from diverse backgrounds. I enjoy puns, making esoteric callbacks, and writing haikus to synthesize my thoughts.
News
- August 2024: Presented a paper with Forrest Davis about training NLP scholars at the TeachNLP workshop at ACL.
- May 2024: Went to HSP 2024. Gave a talk about MTurk vs. Prolific and presented a poster about an improved reanalysis mechanism in SPAWN.
- March 2024: Research student Anzi Wang was chosen as a Mind Brain and Behavior Scholar to pursue our collaborative work using (adaptation to) uncertainty expressions as a tool to study confirmation bias.
- February 2024: SAP Benchmark paper was published at JML.
- February 2024: Moderated "The Promises and Pitfalls of Large Language Models for Science and Society" panel at AAAS.
- December 2023: CLaP lab goes to Singapore to present our BabyLM paper at CoNLL.
- October 2023: Gave an invited talk at the C.PsyD lab at Cornell.
- September 2023: Gave a key note talk at the Summer School on Statistcal Methods for Linguistics and Psychology.
- July 2023: Received an Outstanding Area Chair Award at ACL 2023.
- Also May 2023: Gave an invited talk at the s/lab at UCSC.
- May 2023: The month with lots of AI science communication!
- Appeared on the season finale of Colgate's 13 podcast with colleagues Noah Apthorpe and Nick Diana.
- Engaged in conversations about AI with Colgate's board of trustees.
- Was a member on the ChatGPT panel at Colgate's annual Liberal Arts Core Curriculum retreat.
- April 2023: Gave a talk at the Colgate NASC colloquium.
- March 2023: I presented some work from my dissertation at HSP 2023 and received the Gibson/Federenko Young Scholars Prize.
- July 2022: My first day at Colgate.
- June 2022: I am PhDone! Link to the dissertation.
- December 2021: I received the American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award.