PICoL Lab

PICoL members, Spring, 2025

Welcome to the 🧠 Psycholinguistics, 📡 Information, and 🧮 Computation Lab (PICoL pronounced "pickle" 🥒) at Georgetown University

Our goal in PICoL is to understand the computational mechanisms that facilitate language learning and language processing in the human mind, and to use this knowledge to build intelligent and safe language technologies. To do so, we deploy a multidisciplinary toolkit including deep learning, statistical modeling, formal linguistic theories, and experimental psycholinguistics. PICoL was launched in fall 2024 and is housed in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown. It is directed by Prof. Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox.

📌 Prospective Students: PICoL will be recruiting PhD students in Fall 2026 for admission in 2027. Please see this prospective students page on Ethan's personal website for more information.

Lab News & Updates

📣 Accepted to CoNLL 2026 (@conll_conf)! 🚀
Our new paper w/ @isoshin626 & @weGotlieb proposes a novel information-theoretic approach to formulate working memory storage cost in sentence comprehension!https://t.co/DFeywiOuTg pic.twitter.com/UK8EctdAqp
— Kohei Kajikawa (@qjqw1223) May 19, 2026

🎉 Happy to share that our paper on function words & language learning (w/ Heidi Getz & @weGotlieb) is accepted to #ACL2026! A little late to the party, but still worth celebrating 🥳

We ask: what statistical properties help a learner abstract grammatical knowledge from linear… pic.twitter.com/IuIGn72wHx
— XiulinYang (@xiulin_yang) April 21, 2026

👀Ever wondered how visual information quality affects reading and language processing?
Our new #EMNLP2025 paper, “Modeling Bottom-up Information Quality during Language Processing”, bridges psycholinguistics and multimodal LLMs.
🧠💡👇https://t.co/9z7nbo8UWZ pic.twitter.com/WXkPr8QdmO
— Cui Ding (@CuiDing_CL) November 2, 2025

🥳Thrilled to present our #ACL2025 paper with @t_aoyam, @yuekun_yao, and @weGotlieb on language modeling!

Can LMs’ learning dynamics distinguish typologically attested from unattested and from truly impossible languages? We test this across 12 languages and find: yes, but…👀
— XiulinYang (@xiulin_yang) July 27, 2025

⭐🗣️New preprint out: 🗣️⭐ “Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent” with @cuiding.bsky.social , Giovanni Acampa, @tpimentel.bsky.social , @alexwarstadt.bsky.social ,Tamar Regev: arxiv.org/abs/2505.07659

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— Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox (@wegotlieb.bsky.social) May 13, 2025 at 9:21 AM

📣Paper Update 📣It’s bigger! It’s better! Even if the language models aren’t. 🤖New version of “Bigger is not always Better: The importance of human-scale language modeling for psycholinguistics” osf.io/preprints/ps...

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— Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox (@wegotlieb.bsky.social) May 12, 2025 at 11:48 AM

📣 New Paper ⚖️🧑‍⚖️🏛️ Large Language Models for Legal Interpretation? Don't Take Their Word for It 👩‍⚖️🏛️⚖️ with @bwal.bsky.social , @complingy.bsky.social Amir Zeldes, and @kevintobia.bsky.social papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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— Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox (@wegotlieb.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 9:25 AM