About Me
I am a third-year PhD student in English at McGill University, advised by Richard Jean So and co-advised by Miranda Hickman. Before that, I received two masters from the University of Texas at Austin, a M.S. in information and a M.A. in English. Some of my intellectual ancestors include Edward Said, Lauren Berlant, and Bert Dreyfus.
I mainly work in digital humanities & cultural analytics with NLP methods, and spend most of my time thinking about how literary studies could uniquely contribute to AI research about language. I publish in a mix of NLP/ML conferences and humanities journals.
Some research questions I am currently interested in include:
- Exploring LLMs as viable cultural agents and co-creative systems, through making use of the affordances of hallucinations as confabulations.
- Empirical approaches to close reading (a skill that most universities ask English departments to teach all undergrads)
- modeling close reading as a unique cognitive behavior with eye-tracking, and using it to supervise LLMs to improve their long document understanding
- formalizing its inferential procedures with claim decomposition and entailment parsing
- using information theory to explore the connection between creativity and uncertainty, hopefully leading to creative sampling or other inference-time solutions that make LLMs better interpretive technologies
- Making use of the vast, high-quality, yet unexplored data produced by humanities departments to advance NLP research goals.
- Leveraging archives of literary scholarship as a weighted knowledge base for author-based style transfer.
I am open to collaborate on anything above (and more). Please feel free to email me if you have similar research interests.
Fun Fact About Me
I have a draft of a poetry chapbook almost ready for submission. Then I started doing NLP research.