About Me

qyao[at]utexas[dot]edu

I am a first year Ph.D. student in the UT Austin Computational Linguistics group, advised by Professor Kyle Mahowald. My research interests are in understanding how language models acquire and perceive cognitively-interesting linguistic phenomena, and what they reveal about how humans process language. I am funded by the Harrington Fellowship.

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

Education

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

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

Select Papers

1. Q. Yao, K. Misra, L. Weissweiler, K. Mahowald. 2025. Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models. Accepted to COLM 2025.
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.