I’m a first year Ph.D. student at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine.

I earned an M.S. in computational linguistics at the University of Washington, working with Shane Steinert-Threlkeld at the CLMBR lab. Before that I earned a B.A. in philosophy at UC San Diego.

I’m interested in understanding communication and information processing, in individuals and communities, for both natural and artificial agents. I hope to draw on frameworks from linguistics, machine learning and philosophy to

• address scientific questions about language and cognition
• make progress towards safe artificial intelligence
• assist knowledge workers (e.g., journalists, teachers, scholars)

Below is my CV.

Education

• Ph.D in Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, 2028 (expected)
• M.S. in Computational Linguistics, University of Washington, 2022
• B.A. in Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, 2020

Publications

A semantic universal for modality

Steinert-Threlkeld, S., Imel, N., & Guo, Q. (2023). A semantic universal for modality. Semantics and Pragmatics , 16, 1:EA-1:EA. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.16.1

Modal semantic universals optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off

Imel, N. and Steinert-Threlkeld, S. (2022). "Modal semantic universals optimize the simplicity/informativeness tradeoff." Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 32.

A database for modal semantic typology

Guo, Q. Imel, N., and Steinert-Threlkeld, S. (2022). "A database for modal semantic typology." Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2022). pp 42-51.

Talks

• Modals in natural language optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off
  • Experiments in Linguistic Meaning - May 18, 2022 (Philadelphia)
  • Semantics and Linguistic Theory - June 8, 2022 (Mexico City)

Works in Progress

The evolution of efficient compression in signaling games

Deontic priority in the lexicalization of impossibility modals

The Artificial Language TookKit (ALTK)

Awards

• North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information NASSLLI Student Grant 2022
• Accepted to Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School LxMLS 2021
• Accepted to Carnegie Mellon University Summer School in Logic and Formal Epistemology LFE 2021
• Best paper “Desire Semantics”, selected for UC San Diego undergraduate philosophy journal Intuitions 2020

Work Experience

• Summer 2021: NLP Research Intern
  • Posh Technologies
  • Duties: machine learning research and dataset curation for conversational AI.