I am an assistant professor of linguistics at Cornell University. I am very interested in the incremental representations that humans use to process language, and in differences between how language is used and how it is processed. To explore these topics, I study the relationships between computational language models and psycholinguistic data (e.g., reading times) and I study neural network representations of language to understand what aspects of language can be learned from language statistics directly without having experiences in the real world (i.e. through ungrounded learning).

If you’re interested in incremental processing models, you may find these helpful:

I manage the Computational Psycholinguistics Discussions research group (C.Psyd) and am part of the Cornell Computational Linguistics Lab (CLab) and the Cornell Natural Language Processing Group (Cornell NLP).

My surname is easy to pronounce (in words, not IPA): /van ‘shine-dull/

Recent News

Jan 6: 2 posters at LSA:

Dec 9: 1 Findings of EMNLP paper published: Fangcong Yin analyzes the compression process humans use to generate summaries and the compression functions preferred by human readers.

Apr 3: Gave an invited talk at University of Florida: Surprising Linkages

Mar 9: 5 HSP Posters:

Jan 20: Gave an invited talk at Duesseldorf University: Surprising Mechanisms