Welcome
Welcome to my Linguistics research portfolio and project page, where I nerd out about linguistics!
SLIYS
My first exposure to formal Linguistics came from attending Ohio State's Summer Linguistics for Youth Institute (SLIYS, pronounced "slice") in the summer before my sophomore year. Before then, I'd always been passionate about language, but I had no idea that language could be studied as a science. At SLIYS, I discovered the field of computational linguistics: "If a machine has to do X in order to perform this linguistic task, do humans have to do X as well?" This really fascinated me because it helped me realize that machines can inform our understanding of human language and help diagnose the human condition. Even though computers "understand" language very differently from us, there was so much we could learn from them!
NACLO
After I learned what Linguistics was, I began looking for linguistics opportunities and competitions. I started off with NACLO, qualifying for the Invitational Round by sheer luck before branching out to competitive programming. I loved any competitive programming problems that involved strings or manipulating language in some way.
NLP
That summer, I took a class called AI, Natural Language Processing, and Semantics with Professor Mohammed Taher Pilehvar at Cambridge University. One of the readings we had for the class left a long-lasting impact on me. Man - Woman = Computer Programmer - Homemaker? was how I discovered gender bias in AI and what happened when a language model was trained on a biased dataset. The real-world consequences shocked me: I couldn't help but wonder whether this effect would be more pronounced for languages with grammatical gender, like French or German. AI wasn't just perpetuating our pre-existing biases; it was making them worse.