2025 Symposium

Richard Futrell is an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Language Science where he leads the Language Processing Group. He studies language processing in humans and machines using information theory and Bayesian cognitive modeling. He also works on NLP and AI interpretability.

Jordan Kodner is an Assistant Professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics. Jordan Kodner's research takes a computational approach to language acquisition, acquisition's impact on language variation and change, and its relationship to low-resource natural language processing, with an interest in how small, variable, and unreliable input affect the morphological, syntactic, and phonological learning. His acquisition work has touched on several aeras and varieties of English, and on Latin, Spanish, and Korean, among others, and his work in low-resource NLP aims to include a wide range of world languages, both well-studied and underserved. He received his MSE in Computer and Information Science and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ellie Pavlick is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Brown University, and a Research Scientist at Google Deepmind. She leads the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab, which seeks to understand how language "works" and to build computational models which can understand language the way that humans do. Her lab's projects focus on language broadly construed, and often includes the study of capacities more general than language, including conceptual representations, reasoning, learning, and generalization. They are interested in understanding how humans acheive these things, how computational models (especially large language models and similar types of "black box" AI systems) achieve these things, and what insights can be gained from comparing the two. We often collaborate with researchers outside of computer science, including cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy.