Forrest Davis
Assistant Professor of Computer Science | Colgate University.
322 Bernstein Hall
Colgate University
Hamilton, NY 13346
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colgate University. Before joining Colgate, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Linguistics and Philosophy Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University, where I was primarily advised by Marten van Schijndel, and my B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Columbia University.
I am broadly interested in mismatches between our experiences with language and our knowledge of language. That is, I try to find in linguistic data systematic deviations from what we might expect given our knowledge of grammar. Findings like this excite me because they suggest cases where our minds extend beyond mere correspondence with experience. My primary tool at the moment is neural language models (e.g., GPT-3) trained on text data. Drawing on insights from psycholinguistics, linguistic theory, and cross-linguistic variation, I expose limitations in current AI models and tie these limitations to properties of training data. My dissertation titled “On the Limitations of Data: Mismatches between Neural Models of Language and Humans” sketches out my perspective with case studies.
Besides research and teaching, I love coffee, watching movies, swimming, hiking, and skiing. I cohabitate with a cat named Figaro, who spends his time sleeping throughout our home, sitting on my keyboard, and meowing for food.
news
Sep 4, 2024 | “Humans vs. Machines: Comparing Adjective Learning Performance” accepted as a poster at the 2025 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (with Megan Gotowski). January 9-12, 2025. |
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Jul 31, 2024 | “Training an NLP Scholar at a Small Liberal Arts College: A Backwards Designed Course Proposal” to be presented as a talk at the Sixth Workshop on Teaching NLP (with Grusha Prasad). August 15, 2024. |
Jul 22, 2024 | “Rage Against the Machine: Comparing Human and Model Performance with Adjective Learning” accepted as a poster at the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (with Megan Gotowski). November 7-10, 2024. |
Apr 5, 2024 | Invited talk “Neural Language Models are not Models of Human Linguistic Knowledge” to CSoL at University of Toronto Department of Linguistics! |
Nov 29, 2023 | Guest lecture on neural language models and data to Corpus Linguistics at Pomona College! |