I am interested in biologically constrained representations of language. In particular, I investigate distributed representations of words and sentences that can be implemented efficiently in a network of spiking neurons. Also, I am interested in making neural networks better at supporting natural language by investigating human language acquisition and development.
Apart from brains, computers and robots I am also interested in programming education.
Publications
Theses
- (2020) Computational Mechanisms of Language Understanding and Use in the Brain and Behaviour. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. Abstract PDF External link
Journal Articles
- (2019) The Semantic Pointer Theory of Emotion: Integrating Physiology, Appraisal, and Construction. Cognitive Systems Research. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2017) A Spiking Neuron Model of Word Associations for the Remote Associates Test. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:99. Abstract DOI External link
Conference and Workshop Papers
- (2020) Learning to cooperate: Emergent communication in multi-agent navigation. In 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1993–1999. Toronto, ON. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF
- (2019) Legendre Memory Units: Continuous-Time Representation in Recurrent Neural Networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 15544–15553. Abstract PDF Poster External link
- (2017) A Biologically Constrained Model of Semantic Memory Search. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. London, UK. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF External link
- (2016) Towards a Cognitively Realistic Representation of Word Associations. In 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2183–2188. Austin, TX. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF
Technical Reports and Preprints
- (2018) Evaluating the psychological plausibility of word2vec and GloVe distributional semantic models. Technical Report, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, Waterloo, ON. Abstract PDF DOI External link