Xiulin Yang

Xiulin Yang

Georgetown University

Hi! My name is Xiulin Yang and I’m currently a second-year PhD student doing Computational Linguistics at Georgetown University, advised by Professor Nathan Schneider.

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

My primary interest lies in Computational Linguistics, NLP, Sytnax, and its interface with Semantics. I’m excited to explore how to develop linguistically-motivated, transparent, and (compositionally) generalizable NLP tools and how to objectively evaluate the performance and behavior of existing language models on top of current benchmark datasets. I believe linguistics can provide inspirations to build more explainable and robust neural language models in the way that it helps people be aware of the limitation and strengths of both symbolic and neural approaches in linguistics research and AI applications.

More specifically, I’m interested in compositional generalization, neural-symbolic approaches in NLP and cognitive plausibility of neural networks. I’m also excited to explore new areas!

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

  • 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

  • Yang, X. (2024). Measuring Compositionality of Potential Idiomatic Expressions using Suprisal. (In progress).
  • Yang, X. (2024). Language Models at the Syntax-Semantics Interface - A Case Study of the Chinese Reflexive ziji. (Under review)
  • Yang, X., Groschwitz, J., Koller, A., & Bos, J. (2024). Scope-enhanced Compositioinal 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 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.