Timothy O’Donnell
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2020
Timothy O’Donnell is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila and an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics at McGill University.
O’Donnell develops mathematical models of language generalization, learning, and processing. His research draws on experimental methods from psychology, formal modeling techniques from natural language processing, theoretical tools from linguistics, and problems from all three. He studies problems of language learning and generalization by combining theories of representation drawn from the linguistics literature with modern tools of statistical computation.
Awards
- William Dawson Scholar, McGill University, 2018 - Present
Relevant Publications
- Hoover, J.L., Sonderegger, M., Piantadosi, S.T., O’Donnell, T. J. (2023). The plausibility of sampling as an algorithmic theory of sentence processing. Open Mind. 7, 350-391.
- K. Ellis, A. Albright, A. Solar-Lezama, J. B. Tenenbaum, and T. J. O’Donnell. (2022). Synthesizing theories of human language with Bayesian program induction. Nature Communications. 13(5024), 1–13.
Hoover, J. L., Sordoni, A., Du, W., & O’Donnell, T. J. (2021). Linguistic dependencies and statistical dependence.
Socolof, M., Cheung, J. C. K., Wagner, M., & O’Donnell, T. J. (2021). Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency.
Bergen, L., Bahdanau, D., & O’Donnell, T. J. (2021). Jointly Learning Truth-Conditional Denotations and Groundings using Parallel Attention.