I hold a PhD in Computational Cognitive Neurosceince funded by the Wellcome Trust, from the University of Bristol. My research interests span language models, their linguistic abilities and generalisation, and the intersection of deep learning and cognitive neuroscience.
I worked with Nina Kazanina (NeuroLingo) and Conor Houghton (CNU),
on various projects in natural language processing, episodic memory and reward learning.
I have also spent time teaching and in various committee roles at the university.
RESEARCH
PROJECTS
Few-Shot Learning in Language Models
LSTM language models successfully learn the grammatical gender of novel nouns in a few-shot learning paradigm, and apply this knowledge in a previously unseen context, suggesting that they are capable of abstract syntactic generalisation and represent grammatical gender as a context-invariant property, similar to humans.
EACL 2024 Paper
Large Language Models and Psycholinguistics
Large Language models are not intended as models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, very successful at providing a model for language. Large language models are important in psycholinguistics: they are useful as a practical tool, as an illustrative comparative, and philosophically, as a basis for recasting the relationship between language and thought. Our Commentary on Bowers et al. 2023.
Grammatical Generalisation in Language Models
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are surprisingly great at learning language rules required for natural language modelling. Do LSTMs really learn abstract grammatical rules like humans, or do they rely on simple heuristics? We use gender agreement to study the mechanisms behind LSTMs' linguistic abilities. Contributing to the debate on how humans vs. machines process language.
Adaptive Memory & Reward
The brain preferentially remembers particularly meaningful events. However, we cannot know whether an event is meaningful when we encounter it, thus we need an adaptive memory system that enhances the memory of events after or before it becomes salient. We explore whether such a system is driven by reward.
ROLES
Postgraduate Student Representative
Responsible for organising community-building and wellbeing activities, and representing the student voice at faculty and university level meetings.
EDIC Committee Representative
Represented student voice during committee meetings and contributed to Athena Swan action plan for gender equality.
Neural Dynamics Forum
Organised seminars on integrating experimental and computational approaches in neuroscience.