Yang Xu
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
Yang Xu is a faculty member and directs the Cognitive Lexicon Laboratory at U of T. Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of ideas, and Xu studies how humans construct the lexicon, particularly to convey emerging meanings through time and in different cultures. He takes a computational approach to explore the cognitive foundations of lexical creativity across timescales and the functional principles of lexicons across languages. He also develops computational methods for understanding diachronic processes including semantic change and moral change.
Research Interests
- Computational linguistics and NLP
- Semantic change
- Lexical evolution
- Lexical composition
- Cross-linguistic semantic typology
- NLP for social science
Publications
Books
Computational approaches to semantic change. Berlin: Language Science Press. (2021) biblio [link]
Articles
- Brochhagen, T., Boleda, G., Gualdoni, E., and Xu, Y. (2023) From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity. Science, 381(6656), 431-436.
- Ramezani, A. and Xu, Y. (2023) Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models. In ACL, 428-446, Toronto, Canada.
- Hahn, M. and Xu, Y. (2022) Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality. PNAS, 119(24), e2122604119.
- Sun, Z., Zemel, R., and Xu, Y. (2021) A computational framework for slang generation. TACL, 9, 462-478.