When Charlie first began exploring the field of computational linguistics, they hadn’t yet considered the possibility of going to a national conference. That was until they discovered the Society for Computation in Linguistics. “I knew almost immediately that I wanted to attend their 2025 annual meeting,” Charlie said. “I was curious to learn more about what scholars are currently working on and this seemed like a great opportunity to do so.” 

As they attended the various presentations and poster sessions, Charlie was struck by the diverse nature of computational linguistics research. Investigating LLMs and how they process language was just the tip of the iceberg. Some researchers were creating corpora and datasets for studying specific linguistic features. Others developed computational tools and models that can be applied to a range of different projects. 

One presentation that stood out was by Mary Kathryn Kennedy, whose research focuses on investigating how LLMs can capture hierarchical syntactic structure in their contextual word embeddings. “I found it insightful to hear about both her methodologies and the difficulties she faced during the whole process,” Charlie shared. “Our conversation made me realize that though there’s a good amount of existing work on LLMs, there’s still a lot more that’s yet to be explored.”

Attending one’s first academic conference as an undergraduate student does come with its own set of challenges. As someone still new to the field, the main challenge for Charlie was navigating conversations with people who were more knowledgeable about the topics discussed. “At first I was worried that I wasn’t asking good questions,” Charlie said. “Then I realized that everyone was quite eager to talk about their research with people who are genuinely interested, so no one was going to think my questions were too simple. If I could go back, I’d definitely tell myself to ask more questions.”

Not only did SCiL 20205 expand Charlie’s understanding of computational linguistics research, but it also helped them figure out their own research interests. “I’m very grateful for this opportunity to attend SCiL thanks to the funding provided by the Weinberg Institute,” they said. “I now have a much more concrete sense of which areas of linguistics research I am most curious about.” Moving forward, Charlie hopes to apply what they have learned from this experience to developing ideas for a future research project.