About me

I am a fifth-year PhD student in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, where I work with Dr. Richard Futrell on psychological and computational aspects of sentence comprehension. Before joining UCI, I worked with Dr. Allyson Ettinger and Dr. Ming Xiang at the University of Chicago.

My research build bridges between human brains and machines, addressing how human language is represented and processed in mind, and how it is different from machine language. I use errors in language processing systems as a probe to understand human and machine cognition. I am particularly interested in questions such as:

• (i) (resource) rational inference: how do humans efficiently process noisy language inputs given cognitive constraints in real-time? how do humans achieve success communication despite of imperfect language inputd?
• (ii) adaptation: how do listeners and readers adapt to statistical regularities in linguistic environments with noise and errors? How does language adaptation operate across multiple linguistic representation levels?
• (iii) representation and adaptation / learning in LLMs: why do LLMs generate errors and misinformation? Do LLMs represent noisy language inputs similar to human brains? When do LLMs learn (often unwanted) noise from input data?

I use behavioral, electrophysiological methods (e.g. eye-tracking, self-paced reading, EEG), as well as information-theoretical computational models with state-of-the-art NLP models.

I was born and raised in Taiyuan, a small town in northern China known for minerals. Besides, I speak Mandarin, Chinese Jin dialect, Cantonese, and Japanese. I am foodie of Cantonese cuisine and play games on Nintendo Switch and Steam.