I am currently a a Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow workng with the Cognitive Tools Lab. I also maintain affiliations with the Computational Cognitive Science and LINGO labs at MIT. I completed my PhD at MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in July 2024, advised by Josh Tenenbaum and Jacob Andreas. I received my B.S. and M.S. in computer science at Stanford, advised by Dan Jurafsky and Sebastian Thrun.
My research asks how people understand and learn from language. How do our minds represent and construct meaning from language ā how do we usefully relate words and sentences to everything else that we know and believe? And how do we learn so much from language, from new concepts to entirely new sciences and theories? I am also interested more generally in how minds can tractably and usefully represent the world at all in order to reason, as well as how we learn new concepts or theories in general over a lifetime.
My work seeks to answer these questions by combining theory-driven cognitive experiments with formal computational tools, including structured probabilistic models of cognition, program synthesis, and machine learning approaches. I am particularly interested in approaches that can scale our theoretical and empirical picture of how we understand and learn from language, both by explaining how language relates to other domains of psychology (like intuitive physical or social cognition) and how we can unify disparate formal approaches to modeling language (like those from linguistics, cognitive science, and AI). Iām also a writer. I love a heady and intimate sentence, and would like to build models that explain even a sliver of what we get out of ones as rich and unruly as these.
I use they/them pronouns. Earlier publications appear under the name Catherine Wong šÆ.
liowong@stanford.edu / Google Scholar / Github / writing and clocks
Research Areas
How do we make meaning from language ā and relate language to the rest of cognition?
- From word models to world models: translating from natural language to the probabilistic language of thought. [preprint; SPP 2023] [Simons Talk, Berkeley]
- How do we imagine and make predictions about the physical world from language? [CogSci, 2023]
- How do we relate language about what someone believes to how they are acting? [TACL, 2024]
- How do we imagine and make predictions about what someone's goals from language? [ICML Theory of Mind workshop, 2023]
- How do we adapt our understanding of vague language to a particular context? [CogSci, 2023]
- How do people come up with plans and explanations in totally new situations? [CogSci, 2022]
How do we learn new concepts and theories ā from language and in general?
- How can we use words to learn useful abstractions? [ICML, 2021]
- Do people adapt their vocabularies to the compositional structure of a domain? [CogSci, 2023]
- How can we use language to learn useful abstractions for planning? [ICLR, 2024]
- How can we use language to predict what abstractions might be useful in a domain? [ICLR, 2024]
- What abstract structure exists in the writing system of a language? [CogSci, 2024]
- How do people reason about games they've never played before? [CogSci, 2024]
- How can we construct a more abstract programming language from simpler primitives? (DreamCoder) [PLDI, 2021] [arxiv-extended-version]
- How can we construct an abstract programming language way more efficiently? (Stitch) [POPL, 2023]
How do we build more robust and interpretable AI systems that use language?
- How should we design AI systems that think with and alongside us? [Nature HB, 2024]
- How do people interact with language models to do college-level mathematics? [PNAS, 2024]
- How do people communicate with each other about abstract reasoning tasks? [NeurIPS, 2022]
I love working with undergraduates, including if you're new to research! If you're interested in collaborating, shoot me an email with a description of what you'd like to work on and a CV (if you have one). Visiting undergraduate students should consider applying for funding through the MIT Summer Research Program!