Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Computational Linguist and Cognitive Scientist

shanest@uw.edu | shane.st | clmbr.shane.st (lab)

Last modified: 02/26/24

Employment

University of Washington

Universiteit van Amsterdam

École Normale Supérieure

Google Research and Machine Intelligence

Education

2011-2017 PhD., Stanford University

2007-2011 B.A., The Johns Hopkins University

Awards

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

Publications

Journals

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.

Proceedings

(NB: An * next to the year indicates abstract, as opposed to full paper, review.)

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.

Other

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.

In Process

revise and resubmit Nicolas Guerin, Emmanuel Chemla, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “The Impact of Syntactic and Semantic Proximity on Back-Translation,” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (n.d.).

submitted Yifan Jiang and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “The Weighted Möbius Score: A Unified Framework for Feature Attribution,” in Neural Information Processing Systems, n.d., doi:10.48550/arXiv.2305.09204.

submitted Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro, Andrew Hedding, and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “Iconic Artificial Language Learning in the Field,” n.d.

under contract Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Szymanik, Jakub Computational Explanations of Semantic Universals, Cambridge Elements in Semantics and Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, n.d.).

Talks

Invited

TBD

04/18/2024 University of Toronto Computational Linguistics Colloquium

03/11/2024 Edinburgh Center for Language Evolution

Unnatural Language Semantics

12/08/2023 UMass Amherst Linguistics Colloquium

09/29/2023 Ohio State Linguistics Colloquium

Degrees of Monotonicity

10/18/2023 Computational approaches to language typology and evolution

08/04/2023 Internal and external pressures shaping language

Unnatural Language Semantics

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

Degrees of Monotonicity

12/06/22 McDonell Foundation Workshop on The Nature and Origins of the Human Capacity for Abstract Combinatorial Thought

Unnatural Language Semantics

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

Learning to Translate by Learning to Communicate

09/21/22 Computational Linguistics Seminar @ University of Texas

An Efficient Communication Analysis of Modal Typology

05/19/2022 Cognitive Semantics and Quantities closing workshop

Two Approaches to Explaining Semantic Universals

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)

Cognitive Science to / from NLP

02/22/2021 Montana State University Computer Science Colloquium

Degrees of Monotonicity

06/12/2019 Workshop in Honor of Johan van Benthem’s 70th Birthday

Explaining Semantic Universals

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

Ease of Learning Explains Semantic Universals

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

How to be an Expressivist About Epistemic Modals

06/26/2017 Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary (with Peter Hawke)

Pragmatic Expressivism and Non-disjunctive Properties

03/22/2017 Institut Jean Nicod

Compositional Signaling in a Complex World

12/11/2015 Center for Logic, Language, and Mind (Stockholm University)

Signaling Games

12/10/2015 Higher Seminar in Theoretical Philosophy (Stockholm University)

Epistemic Modality and the Dynamics of Discourse

05/31/2015 Fourth CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Intelligent Interaction

04/14/2015 Stanford Mathematical Logic Seminar

Learning to Use Function Words in Signaling Games

12/11/2013 Knowledge, Argumentation and Games in Amsterdam

Iterating Semantic Automata

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

Refereed

Deontic priority: converging evidence for a semantic universal in the modal domain

01/26/2024 North East Linguistics Society (NELS 52); with Wataru Uegaki, Anne Mucha, Nathaniel Imel

Iconic Artificial Language Learning

07/xx/2023 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 44); with Naomi Tachikawa Shapiro

Northwest Sahaptin modal expressions: a case study

04/21/2023 Workshop on Modality in Underdescribed Languages: Methods and Insights; with Sharon Hargus and Virginia Beavert

Testing Pre-Trained Language Models’ Understanding of Distributivity via Causal Mediation Analysis

12/08/2022 Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP 5, at EMNLP); with Pangbo Ban, Yifan Jiang, Tianran Liu

Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-Trained Language Models

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

An Efficient Communication Analysis of Modal Typology

06/10/2022 Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 32); with Nathaniel Imel

05/20/2022 Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM 32); with Nathaniel Imel

A Database for Modal Semantic Typology

07/14/2022 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP at NAACL; with Qingxia Guo, Nathaniel Imel

A Masked Segmental Language Model for Unsupervised Natural Language Segmentation

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

Bilingual Alignment Transfers to Multilingual Alignment for Unsupervised Parallel Text Mining

05/23/2022 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); with Chih-chan Tien

Emergent Communication Fine-Tuning (EC-FT) for Pretrained Language Models

04/29/2022 Workshop on Emergent Communication: New Frontiers at ICLR; with C.M. Downey, Zeyu Liu, Xuhui Zhou

Linguistically-Informed Transformations (LIT): A Method for Automatically Generating Contrast Sets

11/20/2020 Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP); with Chuanrong Li, Lin Shengshuo, Zeyu Liu, Xinyi Wu, Xuhui Zhou

Complexity/informativeness trade-off in the domain of indefinite pronouns

08/18/2020 Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30); online, with Milica Denic

Quantifiers Satisfying Semantic Universals are Simpler

07/30/2020 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 43); with Iris van de Pol, Paul Lodder, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik

On the Spontaneous Emergence of Discrete and Compositional Signals

07/07/2020 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020); online, with Nur Lan and Emmanuel Chemla

Quantifiers in natural language optimize the simplicity/informativeness tradeoff

12/18/2019 Amsterdam Colloquium (AC 2019)

Most, but not more than haf, is proportion-dependent and sensitive to individual differences

09/06/2019 Sinn und Bedeutung 24; with Sonia Ramotowska, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik

The emergence of monotone quantifiers via iterated learning

07/27/2019 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSc 41); with Fausto Carcassi, Jakub Szymanik

Complexity and learnability in the explanation of semantic universals of quantifiers

07/27/2019 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSc 41); with Iris van de Pol, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Szymanik

Semantic expressivism for epistemic modals, conditionals, and quantifiers

06/22/2019 Bilateral Approaches to Meaning; with Peter Hawke

Nueral Models of the Pyschosemantics of “most”

06/07/2019 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL); with Lewis O’Sullivan

Individual differences in semantic representations affect quantifier processing

04/03/2019 Reasoning, Argumentation and Logic in Natural Language: Experiments and Models; with Sonia Ramotowska, Leendert van Maanen, and Jakub Szymanik

Function Words and Context Variability

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

Assertability Semantics for Conditionals, Quantification, and Modality

03/29/2018 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; with Peter Hawke

Uniform Definability in Assertability Semantics

12/22/2017 Amsterdam Colloquium (AC 2017)

Alternative Representations in Proportional Quantifier Verification

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

Epistemic Modality and the Dynamics of Discourse

05/02/2015 Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy; with Peter Hawke

On the Decidability of Iterated Languages

04/25/2014 Philosophy, Mathematics, Linguistics: Aspects of Interaction (PhML 2014)

Quantifier Scope and Tensed Clauses

10/11/2013 California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Conference (CUSP 6); with Eric Acton and Daria Popova

Deflationism, Gaps, and Expressive Power

04/26/2013 Berkley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy

Ontological Labels for Automated Location of Left-Ventricular Remodeling

09/21/2011 Fifth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing

Public Scholarship

Text Media Appearances

2023Google’s Bard Writes Convincingly About Known Conspiracy Theories” by Davey Alba in Bloomberg

2023Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.” by Drew Harwell in The Washington Post

Teaching

Washington

LING 571 Deep Processing Methods for NLP: Aut ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22

LING 572 Advanced Statistical Methods for NLP: Win ’20

LING 574 Deep Learning for NLP: Spr ’21, ’22

LING 575 Analyzing Neural Language Models: Win ’20, Spr ’21, ’22

Amsterdam

Causality, Decisions, and Games (with Robert van Rooij)

Neural Network Methods for Quantifiers

Stanford

PHIL 152 Computability and Logic

PHIL 23A Cognitive Science of Mathematics

PHIL 150e Logic in Action (with Thomas Icard and Peter Hawke)

Summer Schools and Mini-courses

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

Advising

PhD

Primary Advisor

Committee Member

Graduate Student Representative (external member)

MS theses

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”

Service

Refereeing

Journals

Semantics & Pragmatics (5); Glossa Psycholinguistics; The Psychological Review; Mind; Noûs; Mind & Language; Journal of Data Science; Erkenntnis (3); Synthese (2); The Review of Symbolic Logic (2); Journal of Logic, Language and Information (3); 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

Conferences

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

Conference Organization

General Chair

Area Chair

Mentorship

Regular participant in Pop-Up Mentoring Program (PUMP) for LSA events (e.g. SALT, NASSLLI)

Professional Societies