(My last name is pronounced /upadʰje/ but /upaðje/ or oo-pa-the-ye is fine too)
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 and the meaning lab. Before starting my PhD, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science with a concentation in Machine Learning and Neural Computation with minor in Math from the University of California - San Diego.
Broadly speaking, I’m interested in understanding the computational and cognitive principles underlying language use in humans and language models (LMs). 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 approaches, corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and language modeling to characterize how cognitive resource constraints and communicative pressures shape choices in online production.
Conversely, I’m also interested in using insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistic theory to understand the linguistic behavior of language models (large-ish, considering much of this work uses models with < 1B parameters). As part of my undergraduate research, I investigated the role of lexico-semantic and discourse structure knowledge in shaping the choice of referring expressions in LMs. Understanding the representational and mechanistic properties of these systems is still an active research interest of mine, and some of my ongoing projects in this area use psycholinguistically motivated approaches to explore aspects of pragmatic reasoning, mutual intelligibility, and sentence planning in LMs.