About Me
I’m a final year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, advised by Kenny Smith and Dan Lassiter, and member of the Centre for Language Evolution. I’m interested in understanding how contextual information shapes the evolution of linguistic structure. In my thesis, I explore how variability in referential contexts across a series of successive interactions can affect emerging communication systems on a representational level, in both humans and machines. To this end, I use simulations based on deep learning and Bayesian techniques.
Prior to my PhD, I received my master’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Politehnica University of Bucharest.
Publications
(2024).
Variability in communication contexts determines the convexity of semantic category systems emerging in neural networks.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.
(2023).
Degree of heterogeneity in the contexts of language users mediates the cognitive-communicative trade-off in semantic categorization.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45.
(2022).
The complexity of a language is shaped by the communicative needs of its users and by the hierarchical nature of their social inferences.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44.