About
I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Linguistics and Philosophy Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. My other prior affiliations were with C.Psyd at Cornell, the Cornell Computational Linguistics Lab, the Cornell NLP group, and the Cornell Phonetics Lab. I received my B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Columbia University.
Research
I am interested in computational psycholinguistics. In particular, 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.
My dissertation titled "On the Limitations of Data: Mismatches between
Neural Models of Language and Humans"
argued for the use of neural models
of language as evidence for mismatches between linguistic data and human
linguistic knowledge. I explored three key phenomena: implicit causality,
ambiguous relative clause attachment, and the interaction between
coreference and the Binding Principles from Chomsky (1981), to show concrete
cases where linguistic data leads models to non-human like linguistic
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. More broadly, I've been focused
on developing a framework for interpreting neural models
in light of linguistic theory.
Code for aspects of my previous work can be found on
Github.
[CV]
Upcoming Presentations
TBAHarvard Language & Cognition (LangCog)
February 28, 2023
Publications
Incremental Processing of Principle B: Mismatches Between Neural Models and Humans
Forrest Davis
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2022)
[preprint]
Uncovering Constraint-Based Behavior in Neural Models via Targeted Fine-Tuning
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021)
[paper]
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]
Presentations
Incremental Processing of Principle B: Mismatches Between Neural Models and HumansForrest Davis 2022 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2022)
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. December 7-8, 2022.
Uncovering Constraint-Based Behavior in Neural Models via Targeted Fine-Tuning
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
59th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021)
Virtually. August 2-4, 2021.
[poster] [video]
Forrest Davis and Marten van Schijndel
2020 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2020)
Virtually. November 19-20, 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 2023 @ MIT Lead Instructor Topics in Computational Linguistics
FALL 2022 @ MIT Lead Instructor Special Seminar: Methods in Computational Linguistics [link]
SPRING 2021 @ Cornell Teaching Assistant COGST 1101: Introduction to Cognitive Science Professor: Khena Swallow
FALL 2021 @ Cornell Teaching Assistant LING 2223: Language and Law Professor: Molly Diesing
SPRING 2020 @ Cornell Teaching Assistant LING 4424: Computational Linguistics Professor: Marten van Schijndel
FALL 2019 @ Cornell Research Assistant Professor: Marten van Schijndel
SPRING 2019 @ Cornell Teaching Assistant LING 4424: Computational Linguistics Professor: Natalie DelBusso
FALL 2018 @ Cornell 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, CoNLL, EMNLP, HSP, and PLC.
Last Updated: 29 January 2023