About

I am 朱虹翱 (pinyin: ZHŪ HÓNG ÁO), a second-year PhD student in computational linguistics at UCSD, advised by Alex Warstadt. Before that, I completed my undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai, China.

Research

I work in computational linguistics and computational psycholinguistics. I use language models to model how people learn and process language, and I ask what these models can and cannot tell us about learnability.

Current work:

• Surprisal and human reading. I model human reading times with language-model surprisal. Larger models fit human reading worse: this is not explained by training-data leakage (ACL Findings 2025), it also holds for models’ internal vectors once their extra dimensions are controlled for (EMNLP 2026), and in Mandarin Chinese, whether bigger models predict better depends on the eye-tracking corpus (preprint).
• Critical periods. People who start learning a language late rarely reach native-like proficiency, but language models show no such limit. I am studying what it would take for models to show these age effects.
• What makes a construction learnable. Children learn English passives after actives. Using language models trained on manipulated data, I test whether frequency or morphological complexity explains this, in English and in Māori.

Before UCSD, I worked with Hai Hu at SJTU on how language models acquire the Mandarin Chinese Ba construction and on ZhoBLiMP, a benchmark of Mandarin Chinese minimal pairs; with William Schuler at Ohio State on language model surprisal as a predictor of human reading times; and with Lei Lei on detecting AI-generated text with Burrows’s Delta.

I co-organized the first ChineseBabyLM Challenge (NLPCC 2026), a Mandarin Chinese counterpart to BabyLM, and I organize the UCSD Linguistics BrownBag and the LeM🍋N Lab meetings.

Here’s my CV. I am happy to meet new friends and discuss collaboration or internship opportunities.

Topics

For the questions I have been thinking about lately, see my Puzzles page. I am always happy to discuss them.

Hobbies

Born and brought up in a mountainous cosmopolitan, 重庆 (CHÓNG QÌNG), I love hiking, camping, and hot-pot.