About
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. My other affiliations are with C.Psyd at Cornell, the Cornell Computational Linguistics Lab, the Cornell NLP group, and the Cornell Phonetics Lab. I recieved my B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Columbia University.
Research
I am interested in computational psycholinguistics. In particuluar, I
want to understand the representational content of language and how
language is processed incrementally. Within linguistics, I am interested
in the interaction of levels of linguistic representation, such as
the mapping of phonetics to phonology, the relationship between prosodic
and morphological structure, and how pragmatics and discourse shape and
influence syntactic representations. Within psycholinguistics and
cognitive science, I am interested in event representations and
how linguistic structure follows from dynamical systems.
Recently, I have been working on limits in computational
modeling due to distinctions between language
comprehension and production with relative clause attachment,
the phonological representation of compounds and stress using
corpora, and
what aspects of pragmatic and discourse knowledge can
be acquired from raw text.
Code for aspects of my previous work can be found on
Github.
Publications
Finding Event Structure in Time: What Recurrent Neural Networks can tell us about Event Structure in Mind
Forrest Davis and Gerry T.M. Altmann
Cognition (in press)
[preprint]
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2020)
[paper]
Interaction with Context During Recurrent Neural Network Sentence Processing
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020)
[preprint] [proceedings]
Recurrent Neural Networks Always Learn English-like Relative Clause Attachment
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020)
[paper]
Linguistically Rich Vector Representations of Supertags for TAG Parsing
Dan Friedman, Jungo Kasai, R Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank,
Forrest Davis, Owen Rambow
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms, 122-131. 2017.
[paper]
Upcoming Presentations
Presentations
Discourse structure interacts with reference but not syntax in neural language modelsForrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
2020 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2020)
[video]
Interaction with context during recurrent neural network sentence processing
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020).
Virtually, my office. July 29-August 1, 2020.
[poster] [video] [transcript]
Recurrent Neural Networks Always Learn English-like Relative Clause Attachment
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
58th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020).
Virtually, my office. July 6-8, 2020
[slides] [video]
Recurrent neural networks use discourse context in human-like garden path alleviation
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 2020).
Amherst, MA. March 19-21, 2020.
[abstract] [poster] [osf (includes video)]
Categorical and gradient dimensions of stress in English compounds
Forrest Davis and Abigail C Cohn
2020 Workshop of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLSW 2020).
Berkeley, CA. February 7-8, 2020.
[abstract] [poster]
The relationship between lexical frequency, compositionality, and phonological reduction in English compounds
Forrest Davis and Abigail C Cohn
94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2020).
New Orleans, LA. January 2-5, 2020.
[abstract] [poster]
Effects of lexical frequency and compositionality on phonological reduction in English compounds
Forrest Davis and Abigail C Cohn
25th Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLaP 2019).
Moscow, Russia. September 6-8, 2019.
[abstract] [poster]
The pragmatics of single wh-in situ questions in English
Forrest Davis
93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2019).
New York, NY. January 3-6, 2019.
[poster]
Teaching
SPRING 2021 Teaching Assistant COGST 1101: Introduction to Cognitive Science Professor: Khena Swallow
FALL 2021 Teaching Assistant LING 2223: Language and Law Professor: Molly Diesing
SPRING 2020 Teaching Assistant LING 4424: Computational Linguistics Professor: Marten van Schijndel
FALL 2019 Research Assistant Professor: Marten van Schijndel
SPRING 2019 Teaching Assistant LING 4424: Computational Linguistics Professor: Natalie DelBusso
FALL 2018 Teaching Assistant LING 1101: Introduction to Linguistics Professor: Miloje Despic
Bonus Content
Outside of academics, I swam competively through college. I now lesiurely swim, as well as rock climb, hike, and cross country ski. I cohabitate with a cat named Figaro, who spends his time sleeping throughout our apartment, sitting on my keyboard, and meowing for food. I have served as a senior editor for SALT 29, an editor for SALT 28, and a member of the organizing committee for NELS 49. Additionally, I have reviewed for ACL 2020, ACL 2019, and CoNLL.