Hello! I am a Reader (~ associate professor) at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews. My background spans both academia and industry, with expertise in natural language processing and machine learning. I am passionate about translating cutting-edge research into real-world applications, and I maintain a deep curiosity about fundamental scientific mysteries—particularly the emergence of human language.

I got my PhD degree from ILLC, University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Willem Zuidema. Following that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Ivan Titov at the University of Edinburgh and as a research fellow at the University of Manchester. After more than four years at Amazon, I returned to academia to pursue my own research agenda.

News

• Our paper “On the Importance of Reward Design in Reinforcement Learning-based Dynamic Algorithm Configuration: A Case Study on OneMax with (1+(λ,λ))-GA” has received a best paper award at GECCO’2025 (L4EC track) . Joint work with Tai Nguyen, André Biedenkapp, Carola Doerr, and Nguyen Dang.

• Our paper “Multi-parameter Control for the (1+(λ,λ))-GA on OneMax via Deep Reinforcement Learning” has been accepted at FOGA’2025. Joint work with Tai Nguyen, Carola Doerr, and Nguyen Dang.

Research

Natural language processing

I have been working in natural language processing since my PhD, which focused on recursive neural networks for sentence representation. Over the years, my research has spanned several areas, including information extraction as well as syntactic and semantic parsing.

More recently, in collaboration with Raquel G. Alhama, I have begun exploring the emergence of communication—an exciting direction at the intersection of language, cognition, and learning. To support this work, we co-founded the Koala lab.

Machine learning for optimization

In collaboration with Nguyen Dang and Carola Doerr, I also investigate how machine learning can be leveraged to tackle optimization problems, such as SAT and combinatorial optimization.

Others

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Students

• Thomas Martin (PhD student, sign language translation, co-supervised with Simon Dobson)
• Aarushi Sharma (PhD student, ethics in AI, co-supervised with Anthony F Lang, Jr.)