Welcome!
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Linguistics at Yale University where I am fortunate to be advised by Robert Frank and Tom McCoy. I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences (Linguistics concentration) from Wellesley College in 2023, where I was advised by Carolyn Anderson and Angela Carpenter. I am originally from Shanghai, China.
My research centers on the following two questions:
(i) How is meaning acquired and represented in large (multimodal) language models?
(ii) How can we develop and evaluate natural language processing systems using linguistic insights?
Aside from computational linguistics, I also work on neural process models of articulation under the framework of Dynamic Field Theory.
News
- (September 2026) I successfully defended my dissertation prospectus Cues to Verb Learning: Computational Investigations with Large Language Models! Now ABD!
- (August 2026) My first journal paper The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping is now published on Open Mind!
- (April 2026) Our paper Complement Size and Epistemic Effects in Perception Reports has been accepted to CogSci 2026! See you in Rio de Janeiro!
- (Feb 2026) Our poster Narrowing the Scope of Frequency and Informativity Effects on Word Duration: Experimental Evidence from Mandarin has been accepted to LabPhon 20! See you in Montreal!
- (May 2025) New paper Meaning beyond truth conditions accepted to ACL 2025! We proposed the use of core ideas from dynamic semantics to evaluate LLMs. Shout-out to my amazing collaborators Herbert Zhou, Simon Charlow and Bob Frank. See you in Vienna:)
Last Updated: Feb 2026