(My last name is pronounced /upadʰje/ but /upaðje/ or oo-pa-the-ye is a close approximation)
I’m a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Language Science at the University of California - Irvine, where I’m advised Dr. Richard Futrell and affiliated with the Language Processing Group. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in understanding the computational and cognitive principles underlying language use in humans and (large) language models (LLMs). Presently, I’m fascinated by several questions at the heart of language production — a process that is often pardoxically described as being both easy and effortful. Much of my ongoing work uses computational cognitive modeling, corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and NLP methods to characterize how information processing constraints and communicative pressures shape speaker choices in online production.
Before making the trek to Irvine, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Machine Learning and Neural Computation and a minor in Math from (the far far away land of) UC San Diego. During undergrad, I was a computational neurosciences intern at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), and my senior research focused on investigating the interaction between lexico-semantic and discourse structure knowledge in LMs. Understanding the representational and mechanistic properties of LMs is still an active research interest of mine, and some of my ongoing projects in this area use psycholinguistically motivated approaches to explore sentence planning, pragmatic reasoning, and mutual intelligibility in LLMs.