Xiulin Yang

Xiulin Yang

Georgetown University

Hi! My name is Xiulin Yang and I’m currently a second-year PhD student in Computational Linguistics at Georgetown University, advised by Professor Nathan Schneider. At Georgetown, I also work closely with Professor Ethan Wilcox and Professor Amir Zeldes. I’m a member of NERT and PICoL.

Before that, I have been lucky to work with Professor Jamie Findlay and Professor Hanne Eckhoff at Oxford, Professor Alexander Koller at Saarland and Professor Johan Bos at Groningen.

I’m broadly interested in Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science, NLP, and linguistic theories. I have worked and am working on the following areas:

  • generalization of language models (To what extend can language models generalize from their training data?)

  • inductive bias of language models and humans (What’s the difference between human mind and language models? How can we make language models more human like by introducing such inductive bias?)

  • learnability of natural languages (what makes some languages harder to learn to machines?)

  • computational semantics (How to develope accurate and generalizable parsers? How can we incorporate meaning representation to downstream tasks?)

  • neuro-symbolic NLP (How to incorporate linguistic information to NLP tasks?)

  • targeted evaluation of language models (What do language models know about natural language we speak?)

When I’m not in front of the screen, you can find me bouldering/wall-climbing, reading (I’m a big fan of science fictions!), or swimming.

🔥 News

  • 05-2025 Our paper Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs was accepted to ACL2025 main conference! Feel free to check it out. :)

  • 12-2024 Our paper Language Models at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: A Case Study of the Long-Distance Binding of Chinese Reflexive ziji will be presented at COLING 2025!

  • 09-2024 Our paper Scope-enhanced Compositional Semantic Parsing for DRT will be presented at EMNLP 2024!

  • 07-2024 I gave a talk about LLMs and CL at Shandong University. If you are interested, feel free to reach out for the slides. :)

  • 04-2024 I started my intern at KunLun Tech! Looking forward to learning more about LLMs!

📝 Publications & Presentations

  • Min, J., Yang, X., & Wein, S. (2025). When Does Meaning Backfire? Investigating the Role of AMRs in NLI. Under review
  • Yang, X., Ju, Z., Bu, L., Liu, Z., & Schneider, N. (2025). UD-English-CHILDES: A Collected Resource of Gold and Silver Universal Dependencies Trees for Child Language Interactions. Proceedings of the Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW) at the 2025 Syntax Fest.
  • Yang, X., Aoyama, T., Yao, Y., Wilcox, E. (2025). Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025, main long).
  • Yang, X. (2025) Language Models at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: A Case Study of the Long- Distance Binding of Chinese Reflexive ziji. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
  • Yang, X., Groschwitz, J., Koller, A., & Bos, J. (2024). Scope-enhanced Compositional Semantic Parsing for DRT. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
  • Yang, X., & Schneider, N. (2024). Are AMR Parsers Fooled by Relative Clauses? In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (2024).
  • Otto, C., Groschwitz, J., Koller, A., Yang, X., & Donatelli, L. (2024). A corpus of German Abstract Meaning Representation (DeAMR). In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (2024).
  • Yang, X., Chen, J., van Eerden, A., Samin, A., & Bisazza, A. (2023). Slaapte or sliep? Extending neural- network simulations of English past tense learning to German and Dutch. In Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2023).
  • Yang, X. (2022, July). The Ambiguous Binding of the Chinese Reflexive ziji: a Unified LFG Analysis [Poster presentation]. In Proceedings of the LFG’22 Conference, Groningen, the Netherlands.
  • Yang, X. (2022, June). Was Europeanization of Chinese Intensified from 1946 to 2003? [Poster Presentation]. LOT Summer School, Groningen, the Netherlands.

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 08.2023,2024,2025 Merit-Based Graduate School Scholarship, Georgetown University.
  • 07.2022 George Wolf Prize, The University of Oxford.
  • 04.2021 Erasmus Mundus Language and Communication Program Scholarship, University of Groningen & Saarland University.
  • 07.2020 Outstanding Graduate of Shandong University.
  • 2018-2019 Scholarship for Outstanding Students of Shandong University (2017,2018,2019).
  • 2018-2019 Merit Student of School of Foreign Languages Shandong University (2017,2018,2019).
  • 09.2018 Shandong Radio & TV Station Scholarship, Shandong University.
  • 09.2018 Overseas Study Scholarship, Shandong University.

📖 Educations

  • 08.2023 - present Georgetown University, PhD in Computational Linguistics.
  • 09.2021 - 11.2023 The University of Groningen and Saarland University, Joint Master in Language and Communication Technologies.
  • 10.2020 - 07.2021 University of Oxford, Master in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics.
  • 09.2016 - 07.2020 Shandong University, BA in English.

CV

You can find my CV here.