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General Information

Full Name Jacob A. Matthews
Languages English (native), French (fluent), German (intermediate)

Education

  • 2025 (anticipated)
    PhD
    Cornell University
    • Romance Studies (French), minor in Cognitive Science
    • Committee
      • Laurent Dubreuil (chair)
      • Morten Christiansen
      • Shimon Edelman
  • 2019
    BA
    Columbia University
    • French and Francophone Studies, concentration in Economics
    • Departmental Honors in French and Romance Philology, magna cum laude

Academic Interests

  • Computational linguistics
    • Analyzing language and embedding model representations across linguistic conditions, model architectures, and domains.
    • Evaluating different distance measures and probing methodologies for use with word/document embeddings.
    • Enriching LM representations with structured knowledge representations.
  • Cognitive science
    • Comparing human and machine language processing.
    • Poetry as a cognitive process.
    • Origin of language and cognitive bases for literary form.
  • Literary theory
    • Exploring historical and methodological relationships between cognitive science of language and 20th century literary theory, particularly in French.
    • Marcel Proust and linguistic descriptions of memory.
    • Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida.

Publications

  • Semantics or spelling? Probing contextual word embeddings with orthographic noise
    • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024

Presentations

  • Grokking Wug Vectors
    • March 10th, 2023. 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
  • Poetry and Large Language Models
    • September 21st, 2022. Romance Studies Graduate Colloquium, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
  • Humanists and GPT-3
    • May 7th, 2022. Art & Science of Thinking, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.