I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, where I’m advised by Dr. Richard Futrell. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in understanding the representations and mechanisms 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 both easy and effortful. Much of my ongoing work – which draws on computational cognitive modeling, corpus analysis, experimental and NLP methods — focuses on how information processing and performance constraints shape speaker choices.
Before coming to UC Irvine, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, and Neural Computation with a minor in Math at 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 lexico-semantic, pragmatic, 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 that realm use linguistically motivated approaches to explore pragmatic reasoning and mutual intelligibility in LLMs.