I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Linguistics @ Purdue University, affiliated with the Experimental Linguistics (ExLing) Lab and the Computation and Linguistic Meaning (CALM) Lab. Most of my work sits at the intersection of computational modeling and psycholinguistics, asking: How can humans and language models mutually inform our understanding of language?
Research Interests
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Computational Psycholinguistics — I apply experimental and computational methods to study how humans and language models process and produce language.
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LLM Interpretability — I probe the internal mechanisms of language models to understand how linguistic knowledge is encoded and used.
News 🎉
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June 2026 📑 Can LM-generated surprisal capture human processing semantic ambiguious sentences?.
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Apr 2026 📑 New paper: Mechanistic Interpretability of Animacy Effects on Structure Choice in GPT-2, accepted at CoNLL 2026.
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Mar 2026 📑 New paper out: LLM evaluation on semantically ambiguous structures (Semantic Capacity in Language Learners and LLMs), LREC 2026.
Methods
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Computational & LLM Methods — mechanistic interpretability (activation patching, attention head ablation, representational decoding), LLM evaluation (BERT, GPT-2, LLaMA, ChatGLM, DistilGPT2), surprisal-based analysis, attention and entropy analysis, persona-based prompting via API, model fine-tuning and training, corpus-based analysis
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Psycholinguistics & Behavioral Experiments — picture-based elicited production, self-paced reading, structural priming, truth-value judgment, working memory assessment (backward digit span), language proficiency testing (LexTALE)
Beyond Research
I am passionate about building tools that make science more accessible. Check out some of my contributions to Gorilla Open Science, including designing features and tools that (I hope to) make experimental workflows more intuitive and data processing easier for others.
Contact
📧 li4207@purdue.edu · Department of Linguistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907