About Me

I am currently a PhD Computer Science student at the University of Cambridge focusing on Natural Language Processing (NLP). I am interested in understanding the inductive biases of architectures used in NLP and how we might use inductive biases as a tool to improve data-efficiency and generalisation performance. I also enjoy work that focuses on modelling aspects of language that are difficult to acquire through current standard training methods, such as the pragmatics of communication, the manipulation of semantics, and the incorporation of multi-modal data.

I am co-supervised by Simone Teufel (University of Cambridge) and Ryan Cotterell (ETH Zurich). I previously completed an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge, achieving a Distinction. During this time I was funded by a 2019/2020 DeepMind Scholarship .

Previously, I graduated with an Integrated Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Warwick in 2016. My focus was on Algebraic Geometry. Following this, I worked as a Software Engineer for 3 years.

You can read my CV here .

Publications

Jiaoda Li, Jennifer C. White, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell. 2024. A Transformer with Stack Attention. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024. [arXiv] [code]

Kevin Du, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Niklas Stoehr, Jennifer C. White, Aaron Schein, Ryan Cotterell. 2024. Context versus Prior Knowledge in Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [code]

Jennifer C. White and Ryan Cotterell. 2022. Schrödinger's Bat: Diffusion Models Sometimes Generate Polysemous Words in Superposition. Pre-print. [arXiv] [code]

Jennifer C. White and Ryan Cotterell. 2022. Equivariant Transduction Through Invariant Alignment. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. (Awarded Outstanding Paper) [arXiv] [ACL Anthology] [code]

Jennifer C. White and Ryan Cotterell. 2021. Examining the Inductive Bias of Neural Language Models with Artificial Languages. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [ACL Anthology] [code]

Jennifer C. White, Tiago Pimentel, Naomi Saphra, and Ryan Cotterell. 2021. A Non-Linear Structural Probe. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. [arXiv] [ACL Anthology]

Tian Xu, Jennifer C. White, Sinan Kalkan, and Hatice Gunes. 2020. Investigating Bias and Fairness in Facial Expression Recognition. In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops. [arXiv]

Ekaterina Vylomova, Jennifer C. White, Elizabeth Salesky, Sabrina J Mielke, Shijie Wu, Edoardo Ponti, Rowan Hall Maudslay, Ran Zmigrod, Josef Valvoda, Svetlana Toldova, Francis Tyers, Elena Klyachko, Ilya Yegorov, Natalia Krizhanovsky, Paula Czarnowska, Irene Nikkarinen, Andrew Krizhanovsky, Tiago Pimentel, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Christo Kirov, Garrett Nicolai, Adina Williams, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Hilaria Cruz, Eleanor Chodroff, Ryan Cotterell, Miikka Silfverberg, Mans Hulden. 2020. SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task 0: Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection. In Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology. [arXiv] [ACL Anthology]

Links