Hyewon Jang
Doctoral researcher in computational psycholinguistics
About Me
I am a PhD student in computational psycholinguistics at the University of Konstanz, advised by JunProf. Dr. Diego Frassinelli and Prof. Dr. Bettina Braun. My research focuses on analyzing how language models process pragmatic language that makes human language fun and complex, by using psycholinguistic experiments and the resulting data. My PhD dissertation is about the examination of sarcasm detection models through the lens of psycholinguistics.
Research Interests
- Psycholinguistic experiments: I test hypotheses about linguistic topics by conducting online experiments intended for human participants.
- Computational linguistics: I probe the capabilities of language models using the ideas and data from psycholinguistics. Comparing the behaviors of models and humans serves as a useful indicator for me.
- Multimodality: Communication through language happens in multiple modalities. I examine the effects of textual and audiovisual modalities on human communication.
- Pragmatics and discouse: A lot of complexity occurs in human language especially at the discourse level, and one of the reasons for that is the use of subtle pragmatics. I investigate the ways in which we can pull these complexities out and make them clearer, in order to make pragmatic processing easier for language models.
- Emotion and motivation: Language is often the result of our emotions and motivations manifested in the form of an utterance. I connect these underlying elements with language models to analyze their human-like capabilities.