Regular biography
Tom McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on computational linguistics, specifically how language is learned and represented in humans and artificial neural networks. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2022 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science from 2022 to 2023. His work explores the computational mechanisms underlying the human language faculty, including the representation of syntactic structure in neural networks and the learning mechanisms that enable language acquisition. He is also an organizer of the North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO).