Research

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Publications

Portelance, E., M. Jasbi. (2025). On the compatibility of generative AI and generative linguistics. Nature Computational Science. (Contact me for preprint).

Kazemnejad, A., M. Aghajohari, E. Portelance, A. Sordoni, S. Reddy, A. Courville, N. Le Roux. (2025). VinePPO: Refining Credit Assignment in RL Training of LLMs. Proceedings of 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Portelance, E., S. Reddy, T.J. O'Donnell. (2025). Reframing linguistic bootstrapping as joint inference using visually-grounded grammar induction models. Journal of Memory and Language.

Krojer, B., D. Vattikonda, L. Lara, V. Jampani, E. Portelance, C. Pal, S. Reddy. (2024). Learning action and reasoning-centric image editing from videos and simulations. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Portelance, E., M. Jasbi. (2024). The roles of neural networks in language acquisition. Language and Linguistics Compass.

Portelance, E., M.C. Frank, D. Jurafsky. (2024). Learning the meanings of function words from grounded language using a Visual Question Answering model. Cognitive Science.

Chen, X. and E. Portelance. (2023). Grammar induction pretraining for language modeling in low resource contexts. Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning(CoNLL).

Portelance, E., Y. Duan, M.C. Frank, G. Lupyan. (2023). Predicting age of acquisition for children's early vocabulary in five languages using language model surprisal. Cognitive Science.

Portelance, E.. (2022). Neural Network Approaches to the Study of Word Learning.. [Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University]. Stanford Digital Repository.

Portelance, E., M. C. Frank, D. Jurafsky, A. Sordoni, R. Laroche. (2021). The Emergence of the Shape Bias Results from Communicative Efficiency. Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL).

Potts, C., T. Icard, E. Portelance, D. Card, K. Zhou, J. Etchemendy. (2021). Philosophy of Understanding. In On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models., Ed. by Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) at Stanford University. arXiv:2108.07258.

Portelance, E., J. Degen, M. C. Frank. (2020). Predicting Age of Acquisition in Early Word Learning Using Recurrent Neural Networks. Proceedings of CogSci 2020.

Portelance, E. (2020). Genuine Verb stranding VP-ellipsis in Lithuanian. Proceedings of the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 50).

Portelance, E., A. Bruno, D. Harasim, L. Bergen, T. J. O'Donnell. (2019). Grammar Induction for Minimalist Grammars using Variational Bayesian Inference. arXiv:1710.11350

Harasim, D., A. Bruno, E. Portelance, M. Rohrmeier, T. J. O’Donnell. (2018). A generalised parsing framework for Abstract Grammars. arXiv:1710.11301.

Portelance, E. and A. Piper. (2016). How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinners, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading. Post-45.