Hi! My name is Xiulin Yang and I’m currently a first-year PhD student learning 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 sleeping (then please me alone 😌).

🔥 News

03-2024 One paper Are AMR Parsers Fooled by Relative Clauses? was accepted by DMR Workshop.
03-2024 Our paper A Corpus of German Abstract Meaning Representation (DeAMR) was accepted by LREC!

📝 Publications & Presentations

Yang, X. (2024). Measuring Compositionality of Potential Idiomatic Expressions using Suprisal. (In progress).
Yang, X., Groschwitz, J., Koller, A., & Bos, J. (2024). Compositional DRS Parsing (ARR review).
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.