Computational Linguist and Cognitive Scientist
2019 - now2017 - 2019201720162011-2017 PhD., Stanford University
2007-2011 B.A., The Johns Hopkins
University
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
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.)
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 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.
submitted Toshiyuki
Ogihara and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld “A Defense of an Extensional
Analysis of `Before’,” Semantics & Pragmatics
(n.d.).
in prep Shane
Steinert-Threlkeld and Szymanik, Jakub Computational Explanations of
Semantic Universals, Cambridge Elements in Semantics and Pragmatics
(Cambridge University Press, n.d.).
05/01/23 UC Davis Linguistics Colloquium
Fall 2023 UMass Amherst 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
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
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
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
Committee Member
Graduate Student Representative (external member)
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; 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
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
Regular participant in Pop-Up Mentoring Program (PUMP) for LSA events (e.g. SALT, NASSLLI)