Emmy Liu

Hello! I’m a fifth-year PhD student in the Language Technologies Institute at CMU, where I’m advised by Graham Neubig. Before coming to CMU, I did my undergrad at the University of Toronto. My CV is here. I’ve also interned with Meta, and was fortunate to work with Chenyan Xiong and Scott Wen-tau Yih. I have also visited the Lingo lab at MIT in the summer of 2023, and worked with Jacob Andreas there.

I study how language models develop complex capabilities during training, drawing parallels with human cognitive development. My research investigates three key questions: (1) how to assess whether models truly understand language beyond pattern matching, particularly for figurative language and compositional reasoning; (2) how different capabilities emerge during pretraining and (3) how to design targeted interventions that improve specific capabilities without degrading others.

I’m grateful to be supported by the NSERC PGS-D Fellowship as well as the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship. I am also grateful for the support of the CMU Presidential Fellowship and NEC Fellowship in the past. You can contact me at emmy@cmu.edu if you’re interested in collaborating or chatting about research. I’m happy to also give advice for people who are starting out in research.