I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Ohio State Linguistics Department, working with Professor William Schuler. I am interested in fundamental questions about language acquisition and comprehension: How do children pick up linguistic structure from the limited input they receive, and how do language users piece together complex meanings from sentences they hear or read? My research studies these questions using broad-coverage computational models that draw from advances in natural language processing.

Education and Employment

• 2020–present — Ph.D. in Linguistics, The Ohio State University
• 2018–2020 — Applied Scientist, Amazon Alexa
• 2013–2017 — B.S. in Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh
• 2013–2017 — B.A. in Music, University of Pittsburgh

Publications and Abstracts

• Linear Recency Bias During Training Improves Transformers' Fit to Reading Times.
  Christian Clark, Byung-Doh Oh, and William Schuler,
  arXiv preprint, 2024.
• Categorial Grammar Induction with Stochastic Category Selection.
  Christian Clark and William Schuler,
  Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), 2024.
• Categorial Grammar Induction from Raw Data.
  Christian Clark and William Schuler,
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023.
• Evidence for Composition Operations in Broad-Coverage Sentence Processing.
  Christian Clark and William Schuler,
  The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP), 2022.
• Comparison of Structural Parsers and Neural Language Models as Surprisal Estimators.
  Byung-Doh Oh, Christian Clark, and William Schuler,
  Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2022.
• Surprisal Estimators for Human Reading Times Need Character Models.
  Byung-Doh Oh, Christian Clark, and William Schuler,
  The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP), 2021.
• Comparison of Structural and Neural Language Models as Surprisal Estimators.
  Byung-Doh Oh, Christian Clark, and William Schuler,
  The 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2021.

Presentations

• Categorial Grammar Induction from Raw Data. Short talk and poster presentation at Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD), April 2024.
• Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Language Modeling. Invited guest lecture for Ohio State Summer Linguistics Institute for Youth Scholars (SLIYS), June 2023 and July 2024.
• Evidence for Composition Operations in Broad-Coverage Sentence Processing. Poster presentation at the Ohio State Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences Fall Retreat, October 2022.
• LaTeX for Linguists. Ohio State Language and Computing Committee tutorial, offered annually from 2020–2024.
• Data Selection for Language Modeling. Workshop presentation at Amazon Machine Learning Conference, April 2018.

Honors and Awards

• 2020 — Dean's Distinguished University Fellowship, The Ohio State University
• 2017 — Outstanding Undergraduate Student, University of Pittsburgh Computer Science Department
• 2013 — Chancellor's Scholarship, University of Pittsburgh