Satoru Ozaki (ikazos)
My name is Satoru Ozaki (/oꜜzaki satoɾɯ/). I am a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst.
Before that, I graduated from the Master of Language Technologies (MLT) program in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor was Prof. Eric Nyberg. I also worked extensively with Prof. Lori Levin.
Broadly, I'm interested in how syntax interfaces with semantics, how it affects sentence processing, and how it is found in language models. Specifically, I'm interested in:
- Understanding how scope and binding work by looking at elliptical and multidominant structures.
- Studying what symbolic grammars tell us about ambiguity resolution.
- Looking for abstract syntactic features in the internal representations learned by language models.
- Understanding what kind of abstract generalizations language models make, and to what extent are these generalizations human-like.
curriculum vitæ (last updated: December 2025)
email: sozaki
/attomaakɯ/ umass
/tiɛn214/ edu
News
- 2025/12: My paper on conditional wh-questions with VP Ellipsis is accepted with minor revisions to Natural Language Semantics. Preprint on LingBuzz.
- 2025/10: A preprint of my NELS paper on conditional wh-questions with VP Ellipsis is on LingBuzz.
- 2025/07: I gave a talk at SCiL 2025. My talk was titled "A LSTM language model learns Hindi-Urdu case-agreement interactions, and has a linear encoding of case." This is joint work with Rajesh Bhatt and Brian Dillon.
- 2025/05: I presented a poster at CLS 61. My poster is titled "Japanese accusative/ablative alternation verbs are unaccusative" (poster).
- 2025/03: I gave a talk at GLOW 47, NYU Syntax Brown Bag and the Yale Syntax Reading Group on conditional wh-questions with VP Ellipsis (slides, handout).