Education
| 2017 | Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| 2016 | M.S., Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| 2013 | M.A., Psychology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| 2010 | B.A., Linguistics and Psychology
with High Honors and Special Honors in Linguistics,
University of Texas at Austin |
Employment
| 2021 – | Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo
Department of Linguistics;
Affiliate Faculty, Department of Psychology
Member, Center for Cognitive Science |
| 2022 – | Research Scientist,
Workhuman |
| 2019 – 2021 | Postdoctoral Research Associate,
Language, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab,
University of Wisconsin, Madison |
| 2014 – 2019 | Digital Content Associate Editor,
Psychonomic Society |
| 2017 – 2019 | Affiliated Researcher,
Ferreira Lab, University of California at Davis |
| 2018 | Instructor of Record,
Language and Cognition (PSC 132),
University of California at Davis |
| 2016 – 2018 | Natural Language Processing Data Scientist,
Stitch Fix Inc. |
| 2014-2016 | English Proficiency Interviewer,
Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Research Interests
| Broad | psycholinguistics; learning; memory; concepts; natural language processing |
| Narrow | language production; episodic memory; corpus methods; neural networks; phonological representations; compositionality in language comprehension and production; conceptual combination; unitization; quantitative methods in psycholinguistics; prosody; human factors in natural language annotation tasks |
Peer-Reviewed Publications and Proceedings
(‡ = Equal contribution.)
- Jacobs, C. L., & MacDonald, M. C. (Accepted). The contributions of utterance context and information density on word choice. Cognition.
- Glenn, P., Jacobs, C. L., Thielke, M., & Chu, Y. (2022). The viability of best-word scaling and categorical data label annotation tasks in detecting implicit bias. In Perspectivist Approaches to Disagreement in NLP (LREC 2022), Marseille, France.
- Cho, S-J., Watson, D. G., Jacobs, C. L., & Naveiras, M. (2021). A Markov mixed-effect multinomial logistic regression model for nominal repeated measures: An analysis of syntactic self-priming effects. Multivariate Behavioral Research. doi: 10.1080/00273171.2020.1738207
- Rissman, L.‡ & Jacobs, C. L.‡ (2020). Responding to the climate crisis: the importance of virtual conferencing post-pandemic. Collabra: Psychology. doi: 10.1525/collabra.17966
- Pinter, Y., Jacobs, C. L., & Bittker, M. (2020). NYTWIT: A dataset of novel words in the New York Times. COLING 2020.
- Pinter, Y., Jacobs, C. L., & Eisenstein, J. (2020). Will it Unblend? Findings of EMNLP.
- Buxó-Lugo, A.‡, Jacobs, C. L.‡, & Watson, D. G. (2020). The world is not enough to explain lengthening of phonological competitors. Journal of Memory and Language, 110, 104066. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104066
- Watson, D. G., Jacobs, C. L.‡, & Buxó-Lugo, A.‡ (2020). Prosody indexes competence and performance. WIREs Cognitive Science.
- Jacobs, C. L., Loucks, T., Watson, D. G., & Dell, G. S. (2019). Masking auditory feedback does not eliminate repetition reduction. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 1-13. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1693051
- Jacobs, C. L., Cho, S.-J., & Watson, D. G. (2019). Self-priming in production: evidence for a hybrid model of syntactic priming. Cognitive Science, 43, e12479. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12749
- Hubbard, R. J., Rommers, J., Jacobs, C. L., & Federmeier, K. D. (2019). Downstream behavioral and electrophysiological consequences of prediction on recognition memory. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 291. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00291
- Jacobs, C. L. & Mailhot, F. (2019). Encoder-decoder models for latent phonological representations of words. Proceedings of SIGMORPHON 2019, Association for Computational Linguistics. Florence, Italy. [ACL anthology link]
- Jacobs, C. L., Dell, G. S., & Bannard, C. (2017). Phrase frequency effects in free recall: Evidence for redintegration. Journal of Memory and Language, 97C, 1-16. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2017.07.003
- Jacobs, C. L., Dell, G. S., Benjamin, A. S., & Bannard, C. (2016). Part and whole linguistic experience affect recognition memory for multiword sequences. Journal of Memory and Language, 87, 38-58. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.11.001
- Jacobs, C. L., Yiu, L. K., Watson, D. G., & Dell, G. S. (2015). Why are repeated words produced with reduced durations? Evidence from inner speech and homophone production. Journal of Memory and Language, 84, 37-48. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.05.004
- Jacobs, C. L. (2015, June). Predictions for self-priming from incremental updating models unifying comprehension and production processes. Proceedings of Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, NAACL-HLT 2015. Denver, CO. pp. 1-8.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Dell, G. S. (2014). ‘hotdog’ not ‘hot’ ‘dog’: The phonological planning of compound words. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 29, 512-523. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.892144
Book Chapters
- Jacobs, C.L. (2021). Quantifying Context With and Without Statistical Language Models. In Danesi, M. (Ed.), The Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics. Springer. https://osf.io/mpqut/
- Dell, G.S., & Jacobs, C.L. (2015). Successful speaking: Cognitive mechanisms of adaptation in language production. In G. Hickok & S.L. Small (Eds.), The Neurobiology of Language (pp. 209-220). Elsevier.
Manuscripts under review
- Li, L., Buxó-Lugo, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Slevc, R. – Are the semantic representations of polysemous words graded or discrete? Accepted as a Registered Report in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
- Griffin, Z., & Jacobs, C. L. - When do mothers address their young children by name? Under revision in Language and Speech.
Manuscripts in preparation
- Jacobs, C. L., & MacDonald, M. C. – Constraint satisfaction and modern neural network models of language. Invited submission to Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience.
- Schwering, S., Jacobs, C. L., Montemayor, J., & MacDonald, M. C. – Lexico-syntactic properties affect verbal working memory in sentence-like lists.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Huber, D. E. – The continuous bag-of-words model as a model of human episodic memory.
- Tippenhauer, N., Jacobs, C. L., & Watson, D. G. – Different levels of linguistic representation affect different aspects of speech prosody.
- Jacobs, C. L., Erk, K. – Model selection principles for predicting human semantic processing.
- Jacobs, C. L. – Compositionality in distributionally-acquired phonological category representations.
Conference Presentations
(* = Invited presentation)
- Jacobs, C. L., Schwering, S., & MacDonald, M. C. (2022, July). Conditional probability of novel word sequences predicts immediate serial recall performance. Poster to be presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Toronto, Canada.
- Li, L., Buxó-Lugo, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Slevc, L. R. (2022, June). Are lexical representations graded or discrete? Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production.
- Beatty, S., Kochupurackal, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Cohen-Goldberg, A. (2022, June). Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production.
- Jacobs, C. L., Hubbard, R. J., & Federmeier, K. D. (2022, February). Masked language models directly encode linguistic uncertainty. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 5, 23. doi: 10.7275/znzq-3m28
- Schwering, S., Jacobs, C. L., & MacDonald, M. C. (2021, November). Lexico-syntactic statistics affect item and order memory in immediate serial recall. Talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.
- Jacobs, C. L., & MacDonald, M. C. (2021, September). Global sentence properties rather than local probabilities drive wordform selection. Talk presented at the 27th meeting of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Paris, France.
- Pinter, Y., Jacobs, C. L., & Eisenstein, J. (2021, February). Will it Unblend? Presentation given at Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL).
- Myers, B., Jacobs, C. L., Buxó-Lugo, A., & Watson, D. G. (2020, November). Is word lengthening driven by phonological representations or acoustic properties? Oral presentation given at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.
- Jacobs, C. L., McCarthy, A. D., & MacDonald, M. C. (2020, September). On the relationship between form and information content. Oral presentation given at the 26th meeting of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Potsdam, Germany.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Huber, D. E. (2020, August). The Lexical Context Model of memory for words in lists. Oral presentation given at the Context and Episodic Memory Symposium. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- Jacobs, C. L., & McCarthy, A. D. (2020, July). The human unlikeness of neural language models. Poster presented at the Workshop for Widening NLP (WiNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, WA. [Video link.]
- Jacobs, C. L. & Huber, D. E. (2019, November). The Lexical Context Model: A continuous bag of words model of semantic and episodic memory. Invited talk given at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology Pre-Conference, Psychonomic Society, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
- Jacobs, C. L., & Erk, K. (2019, March). Using word2vec to predict human language processing. Poster presented at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Boulder, Colorado.
- Jacobs, C. L., & Ferreira, F. (2019, March). Contrastive focus constructions hurt memory for sentence meaning. Poster presented at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Boulder, Colorado.
- Jacobs, C. L., Cho, S.-J., & Watson, D. G. (2019, March). Speakers do prime themselves. Poster presented at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Boulder, Colorado.
- Jacobs, C. L. (2018, November). What speech prosody can tell us about cognition. Symposium lead and panel discussion chair, Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting. New Orleans, Louisiana.
- Jacobs, C. L., Loucks, T., Watson, D. G., & Dell, G. S. (2018, November). The shortening of repeated words does not depend on speakers receiving auditory feedback. Poster presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. New Orleans, Louisiana.
- Tippenhauer, N., Jacobs, C. L., Watson, D. G. (2018, March). Production predictions: Word duration under two theories. Poster presented at the 31st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Davis, California.
- Buxó-Lugo, A., Jacobs, C. L., & Watson, D. G. (2018, March). Hear no evil or speak no evil: Lengthening of phonological competitors. Oral presentation given at the 31st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, California.
- Jacobs, C. L. (2017, July). The role of domain in learning about referents. Poster presented at the Workshop for Women and Underrepresented Minorities in NLP. Vancouver, Canada.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Dell, G. S. (2016, September). Experience with phrases stitches their words together during free recall. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP). Bilbao, Spain.
- Jacobs, C. L., Loucks, T. M. J., Watson, D. G., & Dell, G. S. (2016, July). Testing the role of auditory feedback in repetition reduction. Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production. San Diego, California.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Watson, D. G. (2016, March). The magnitude of syntactic self-priming and comprehension-to-production priming. Poster presented at the 29th annual meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Gainesville, FL.
- Jacobs, C. L., Dell, G. S., Bannard, C., & Benjamin, A. S. (2015, November). Frequent phrases are easier to recall, but not easier to recognize. Poster presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Chicago, IL.
- Jacobs, C. L., Yiu, L. K., Pinet, S. & Watson, D. G. (2015, November). Differences in chaining mechanisms in speech production and sentence typing. Poster presented at the 56th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Chicago, IL.
- Hubbard, R. J., Rommers, J., Jacobs, C. L. & Federmeier, K. D. (2015, November). Electrophysiological predictors of successful memory during encoding of sentential information vary based on constraint and predictability. Poster presented at the 7th annual meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. Chicago, IL.
- Hubbard, R. J., Rommers, J., Jacobs, C. L. & Federmeier, K. D. (2015, October). Effects of expectedness and sentential constraint on memory for words: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Poster presented at the 55th annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Seattle, WA.
- Jacobs, C. L., Watson, D. G. & Bock, J. K. (2015, March). Speakers do not self-prime. Poster presented at CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
- Jacobs, C. L., Dell, G. S. & Benjamin, A. S. (2014, September). Words are less salient in phrases: Evidence from frequency effects in recognition memory. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP). Edinburgh, Scotland.
- Jacobs, C. L., Watson, D. G. & Dell, G. S. (2014, July). Why do we shorten repeated words? Evidence against the production priming account. Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production. Geneva, Switzerland.
- Jacobs, C. L., Watson, D. G. & Dell, G. S. (2014, March). Reduction in duration depends on articulation, not simply facilitated processing. Poster presented at CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
- Jacobs, C.L., Dell, G. S., Benjamin, A. S. & Bannard, C. (2013, November). Phrases don’t behave like words: Phrase frequency effects in recognition memory. Poster presented at the 54th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
- Jacobs, C. L., Ireland, M. E. & Watson, D. G. (2013, September). Speaking style shifts following verbal and nonverbal interaction. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP). Marseille, France.
- Jacobs, C.L., Dell, G. S., Benjamin, A. S. & Bannard, C. (2013, September). Are word sequences like words? The role of phrase frequency in recognition memory. Poster presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP). Marseille, France.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Dell, G. S., (2012, November). The production of hotdog is not the production of hot and then dog. Poster presented at the 53rd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Minneapolis, MN.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Dell, G. S., (2012, July). When is there no dog in hotdog? Form preparation in nominal compounds. Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production. New York, NY.
- Jacobs, C. L. & Griffin, Z. M., (2010, December). When do mothers address their children by name? A corpus analysis. Talk presented at the Vocative! Workshop. Bamberg, Germany.
Seminars and Colloquia
2022
- Language shapes memory: Insights from behavioral and computational approaches. Invited talk given at Department of Psychology Brownbag, Pacific Lutheran University. Postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19.
2021
- Understanding the contributions of linguistic style and sequence probabilities to lexical choice. Invited talk given at Center for Cognitive Science Symposium, University at Buffalo.
- Understanding the contributions of linguistic style and sequence probabilities to lexical choice. Invited talk given at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Linguistics Seminar Series.
- Career paths in academia. Presentation to the Romance Languages Department Graduate Seminar at the University at Buffalo.
2020
- On the relationship between form and information content. Invited talk given at the Linguistics Fridays Colloquium, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
- Re-evaluating the “info”/“information” content in lexical alternatives. Invited talk given at the University of Pennsylvania Integrated Language Science and Technology Seminar.
- Title TBA. Invited talk in Department of Linguistics Colloquium, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19.
- The role of language experience in memory for words and phrases. Job talk given to the Department of Psychology, University at Kansas.
- A gentle introduction to extracting text features for machine learning models using Python. Workshop tutorial given at the Data Science Research Bazaar, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. University of Wisconsin, Madison.
- The role of language experience in memory for words and phrases. Job talk given to the Department of Psychology, Syracuse University.
- Of hotdogs and hot dogs: The contributions of parts and wholes to language processing. Job talk given to the Department of Linguistics, University of California – Santa Barbara.
2019
- The joint contributions of part and whole linguistic experience on language processing. Job talk given to the Linguistics Department Colloquium, University at Buffalo.
- Red snappers and red herrings: The linguistic representations of word combinations. Job talk given at the Linguistics Colloquium, Cornell University. Ithaca, New York.
2018
- Quantifying the compositionality of multiword expressions. Invited talk given to the Computational Linguistics Lab, CUNY Graduate Center.
- What memory for phrases can tell us about memory and phrases. Invited talk given at the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Brownbag, University of Massachusetts – Amherst.
- Data and anecdata: Data science as a career path. Presentation given to the Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience Group at the University of California – Davis.
Pre-2018
- October 2017: Imposing structure on unstructured text at Stitch Fix. Invited oral presentation given at the 3rd annual Crunch Data Analytics and Engineering Conference, Budapest, Hungary.
- March 2016: The cognitive representations of compositional expressions: Evidence from recognition and recall. Invited talk given to the IU Cognitive Computing Lab meeting.
- March 2016: Keeping your thoughts to yourself: The role of inner speech in audience design. Invited presentation given at the Beckman Graduate Student Seminar.
- November 2015: Constraints speakers place on repetition reduction and accenting. Invited presentation to the Linguistics Colloquium Seminar, University of Illinois.
- October 2015: Memory for words and phrases. Cognitive Brownbag Seminar, University of Illinois.
- September 2015: Solving the sequential ordering problem in speech and skilled typing. Language Processing Brownbag Seminar, University of Illinois.
- November 2014: What frequency effects in recognition memory tell us about phrases. Invited presentation given at Beckman Graduate Student Seminar, University of Illinois.
- October 2014: What frequency effects in recognition memory tell us about phrases. Or: Is a handsome wizard still a wizard? Cognitive Brownbag Seminar, University of Illinois.
Awards
| 2015-2016 | Beckman Institute Graduate Research Fellowship |
| 2015-2016 | National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) |
| 2013 | Best poster award
Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing |
| 2011-2016 | National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship |
| 2009-2010 | Undergraduate Research Fellowship
University of Texas at Austin |
Teaching
| 2022 | LIN 624SEM - Modeling Rational Language Production |
| 2022 – Pres. | LIN/CSE 667 – Advanced Computational Linguistics |
| 2021 – Pres. | LIN/CSE 467/567 – Computational Linguistics |
| 2021 | Guest Lecture: Psycholinguistics
University at Buffalo Department of Psychology |
| 2021 | Guest Lecture: Language Production in Adults and Children
UW Madison Department of Psychology
Topic: Syntactic Structure and Reuse in Language Production |
| 2020 | Guest Lecture: Writing Systems, CUNY Department of Linguistics
Topic: Literacy and phonological awareness |
| 2018 | Undergraduate Statistical Learning Tutorial Series
University of Rochester |
| 2018 | Instructor of Record, PSC 132 – Language and Cognition
University of California, Davis |
| 2014 | Machine Learning Reading Group for Psychology and Neuroscience
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Co-organizer |
| 2012 | PSYCH 331 – Laboratory in Cognitive Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Laboratory Teaching Assistant |
Service
| 2019 | Diversity and Inclusion Committee
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)
Committee Member |
| 2018 – 2022 | Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Co-organizer |
| 2017 | Delta Analytics
Data Science Fellow for Social Good |
Reviewing
Conferences
| 2022 – Pres. | Queer in AI
|
| 2022 | Disembodiment |
| 2022 – Pres. | SIGMORPHON |
| 2021 – Pres. | Action Editor, ACL Rolling Review |
| 2021 – Pres. | BlackboxNLP |
| 2021 | Area Chair, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics Track
EACL
[2021 Outstanding Area Chair] |
| 2020 | Area Chair, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics Track
Association for Computational Linguistics |
| 2016 – Pres. | Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
| 2016 – Pres. | Association for Computational Linguistics
ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and CoNLL
[2018 Top Reviewer] |
| 2018 – Pres. | Widening NLP (WiNLP) Workshop |
| 2018 – Pres. | Human Sentence Processing Conference
also formerly known as CUNY |
| 2018 | Grace Hopper Conference, Data Science track |
| 2019 – Pres. | Context and Compositionality in Biological and Artificial Neural Systems Workshop (NeurIPS 2019) |
Journals
| 2016 – Pres. | Journal of Experimental Psychology – Learning, Memory, and Cognition |
| 2018 – Pres. | Cognition |
| 2018 – Pres. | Behavior Research Methods |
| 2019 – Pres. | Cognitive Science |
| 2020 – Pres. | Memory & Cognition |
| 2020 – Pres. | Journal of Open Source Software (JoSS) |
| 2021 – Pres. | Frontiers in Psychology |
| 2021 – Pres. | Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) |
| 2022 – Pres. | Psychonomic Bulletin and Review |
Professional Memberships
Psychonomic Society
Society for Human Sentence Processing
Association for Computational Linguistics
Cognitive Science Society
Society for Mathematical Psychology
