Scholar
Sophie Hao
Google Scholar ID: fl7rVEYAAAAJ
Boston University
Citations & Impact
Citations
2,314
H-index
10
i10-index
10
Publications
20
Co-authors
13
list available
Publications
Resume (English only)
Academic Achievements
- Representative Publications:
- - Formal Language Recognition by Hard Attention Transformers: Perspectives from Circuit Complexity, TACL, 2022
- - Verb Conjugation in Transformers is Determined by Linear Encodings of Subject Number, EMNLP Findings, 2023
- - What Goes Into a LM Acceptability Judgment? Rethinking the Impact of Frequency and Length, NAACL, 2025
- - Generative Linguistics, Large Language Models, and the Social Nature of Scientific Success, Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2025
- - ModelCitizens: Representing Community Voices in Online Safety, EMNLP, To Appear
- Recent Invited Talks:
- - Towards a Science and Mathematics of Language Models, Mathematics of Language Conference, 2025
- - Word Embeddings: Examining Culture Through a Data-Driven Lens, Vanderbilt University Department of English, 2024
- - Transformers and Circuit Complexity, Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Mathematics, 2023
- - Understanding RNNs and Transformers using Formal Languages, ETH Zürich Department of Computer Science, 2022; University of Notre Dame Department of Computer Science, 2022
Research Experience
- Assistant Professor, Boston University, 2025–present
- Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, New York University, 2022–2025
- With Tal Linzen, Sunoo Park, and others
- Natural Language Machine Learning Intern, Apple, Summer 2021
- With Hadas Kotek, David Q. Sun, and others
- Visiting Researcher, National Institute of Informatics, Summer 2017
- With Makoto Kanazawa, Ryo Yoshinaka, and others
- Software Developer, Epic, 2015–2016
- Sales and Trading Intern, Wells Fargo Securities, Summer 2014
- Market Research Intern, Networked Insights, Summer 2012
Education
- PhD in Linguistics and Computer Science, Yale University, 2022
- Advisors: Dana Angluin and Bob Frank
- Committee: Yoav Goldberg, John Lafferty, Jason Shaw
- BA in Mathematics and Linguistics, University of Chicago, 2015
- Advisor: Greg Kobele
Background
- Interests include but are not limited to: probing, neural representations, feature attribution; linguistic evaluation and psycholinguistic modeling; theory of computation, analysis of neural architectures; generative linguistics, syntax, phonology, mathematical linguistics; bias, fairness, digital humanities and social science; theoretical foundations of NLP and computational linguistics.
Miscellany
- Personal interests and other information are not explicitly mentioned on the webpage.
