Zhenghao (“Herbert”) started his PhD in Linguistics in 2022. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022 with a B.S. in computer science & mathematics and PNP (the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program focusing on linguistics). He is interested in the intersection of computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, with the long-term goal of formally characterizing human cognition, specifically language capabilities. He works with various cognitively plausible computational models (e.g. gradient symbolic computation, self-organized sentence processing, ACT-R, dynamical field theory) to simulate phenomena of syntactic processing and sentence production. He also works on behavioral evaluation and mechanistic interpretability on language language models, pursuing the hypothesis of treating neural networks as cognitive models. He is also interested in sentence production theories based on Tree-Adjoining Grammar.
Research Languages: Mandarin Chinese, English