About Me

qyao[at]utexas[dot]edu

I am a second year Ph.D. student in the UT Austin Computational Linguistics group, advised by Professor Kyle Mahowald. I am interested in how language models learn and exhibit complex linguistic and cognitive behaviors. My studies are funded by the Harrington Fellowship.

Before coming to UT, I completed a B.S. in Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies. There, I worked with Professor Sui Tang on applying compressed sensing theory to graph signal processing. I also completed a senior thesis with Professor Simon Todd on extracting and analyzing BERT’s preferences for English dative and genitive alternations. This work received the top senior paper award in linguistics at UCSB.

Education

Ph.D. Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, 2024 - Present

B.S. Mathematics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2020 - 2024

Publications

Computational Linguistics

1. Q. Yao, K. Misra, L. Weissweiler, K. Mahowald. 2025. Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models. In Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).
2. Q. Yao, S. Todd. 2024. BERT’s Insights Into the English Dative and Genitive Alternations. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL).

Graph Signal Processing

3. L. Huang, D. Li, S. Tang, Q. Yao. 2025. Random Space-Time Sampling and Reconstruction of Sparse Bandlimited Graph Diffusion Field. Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications.
4. Q. Yao, L. Huang, S. Tang. 2023. Space-Time Variable Density Samplings for Sparse Bandlimited Graph Signals Driven by Diffusion Operators. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).