Weijie Xu ｜ 徐 炜 杰

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Linguistics at UMass Amherst. I am a member of the Computational Sentence Processing Lab working with Brian Dillon. My area of specialization is computational psycholinguistics.

RESEARCH GOALS

The goal of my research is to answer: (i) what are the computational problems in language processing and learning? (ii) how are these problems solved by our cognitive system? (iii) how do those cognitive solutions shape the mechanisms and representations underlying human language faculty? In answering these questions, I aim to develop psycholinguistic theories in terms of deeper principles about how human cognition operates under resource constraints. At the same time, I aim to provide functionalist explanations grounded in psycholinguistic theories for why languages are structured the way they are.

To achieve this goal, I draw upon computational modeling (e.g., Bayesian modeling, information theory), combined with experimental methods and large-scale naturalistic data, leveraging cutting-edge NLP techniques such as language modeling.

MY BACKGROUND

I received my Ph.D. in Language Science from University of California Irvine, working with Richard Futrell. Before that, I earned my M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago, where I worked with Ming Xiang. Prior to entering the field of linguistics, I earned my B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University in China.

Born in Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi Province in China, I am a native speaker of both Mandarin Chinese and Gan Chinese, Nanchang Dialect (赣语-南昌话).