My research is in natural language processing, the subfield of computer science that aims to enable computers to understand and produce human language. I focus mainly on language translation, and am interested in syntactic parsing and other areas as well.
Teaching
Recent and selected publications
Andy Yang, Micha
ël Cadilhac, and David Chiang.
Knee-deep in
C-RASP: a transformer depth hierarchy.
2025.
arXiv:2506.16055.
PDF
BibTeX
@misc{yang+:2025,
author = {Yang, Andy and Cadilhac, Micha{\"e}l and Chiang, David},
title = "Knee-Deep in {C-RASP}: A Transformer Depth Hierarchy",
note = "{arXiv}:2506.16055",
url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16055",
year = "2025"
}
Andy Yang, Lena Strobl, David Chiang, and Dana Angluin.
Simulating hard attention using soft attention.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025.
To appear.
PDF
BibTeX
@article{yang-etal-2025-softmax,
author = "Yang, Andy and Strobl, Lena and Chiang, David and Angluin, Dana",
title = "Simulating Hard Attention Using Soft Attention",
year = "2025",
journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
xnote = "{arXiv}:2412.09925",
note = "To appear",
url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09925"
}
Aarohi Srivastava and David Chiang.
We're calling an intervention: exploring fundamental hurdles in adapting language models to nonstandard text.
In
Proc. Workshop on Noisy and User-Generated Text. 2025.
Best Paper Award.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{srivastava-chiang-2025,
author = "Srivastava, Aarohi and Chiang, David",
title = "We're Calling an Intervention: Exploring Fundamental Hurdles in Adapting Language Models to Nonstandard Text",
booktitle = "Proc. Workshop on Noisy and User-Generated Text",
year = "2025",
url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07304"
}
Kenneth J. Sible and David Chiang.
Using source-side confidence estimation for reliable translation into unfamiliar languages.
2025.
arXiv:2503.23305v1.
PDF
BibTeX
@misc{sible-chiang-2025,
author = "Sible, Kenneth J. and Chiang, David",
title = "Using Source-Side Confidence Estimation for Reliable Translation into Unfamiliar Languages",
year = "2025",
url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23305v1",
note = "arXiv:2503.23305v1"
}
David Chiang.
Transformers in uniform
TC\(^0\).
Transactions on Machine Learning Research, January 2025.
PDF
BibTeX
@article{chiang:2025,
author = "Chiang, David",
title = "Transformers in Uniform {TC$^0$}",
journal = "Transactions on Machine Learning Research",
year = "2025",
month = "January",
url = "https://openreview.net/forum?id=ZA7D4nQuQF"
}
Lena Strobl, Dana Angluin, David Chiang, Jonathan Rawski, and Ashish Sabharwal.
Transformers as transducers.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 13:200–219, 2025.
doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00736.
DOI
BibTeX
@article{strobl-etal-2025-transducers,
author = "Strobl, Lena and Angluin, Dana and Chiang, David and Rawski, Jonathan and Sabharwal, Ashish",
title = "Transformers as Transducers",
journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
volume = "13",
pages = "200--219",
year = "2025",
doi = "10.1162/tacl\_a\_00736"
}
Andy Yang, David Chiang, and Dana Angluin.
Masked hard-attention transformers recognize exactly the star-free languages.
In
Proc. NeurIPS 37, 10202–10235. 2024.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{yang+:2024,
author = "Yang, Andy and Chiang, David and Angluin, Dana",
title = "Masked Hard-Attention Transformers Recognize Exactly the Star-Free Languages",
booktitle = "Proc. NeurIPS 37",
url = "https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper\_files/paper/2024/hash/13d7f172259b11b230cc5da8768abc5f-Abstract-Conference.html",
year = "2024",
pages = "10202--10235"
}
Kenneth J. Sible and David Chiang.
Improving rare word translation with dictionaries and attention masking.
In
Proc. AMTA, 225–235. 2024.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sible-chiang-2024-improving,
author = "Sible, Kenneth J. and Chiang, David",
title = "Improving Rare Word Translation With Dictionaries and Attention Masking",
booktitle = "Proc. AMTA",
year = "2024",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.amta-research.19/",
pages = "225--235"
}
Andy Yang and David Chiang.
Counting like transformers: compiling temporal counting logic into softmax transformers.
In
Proc. CoLM. 2024.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{yang-chiang-2024-counting,
author = "Yang, Andy and Chiang, David",
title = "Counting Like Transformers: Compiling Temporal Counting Logic Into Softmax Transformers",
booktitle = "Proc. CoLM",
year = "2024",
url = "https://openreview.net/forum?id=FmhPg4UJ9K"
}
Chihiro Taguchi and David Chiang.
Language complexity and speech recognition accuracy: orthographic complexity hurts, phonological complexity doesn't.
In
Proc. ACL. 2024.
Outstanding Paper Award and Senior Area Chair Award.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{taguchi-chiang-2024-complexity,
author = "Taguchi, Chihiro and Chiang, David",
title = "Language Complexity and Speech Recognition Accuracy: Orthographic Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn't",
year = "2024",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.827/",
booktitle = "Proc. ACL"
}
Fahim Faisal, Orevaoghene Ahia, Aarohi Srivastava, Kabir Ahuja, David Chiang, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Antonios Anastasopoulos.
DIALECTBENCH: a
NLP benchmark for dialects, varieties, and closely-related languages.
In
Proc. ACL. 2024.
Social Impact Award.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{faisal+:2024,
author = "Faisal, Fahim and Ahia, Orevaoghene and Srivastava, Aarohi and Ahuja, Kabir and Chiang, David and Tsvetkov, Yulia and Anastasopoulos, Antonios",
title = "{DIALECTBENCH}: A {NLP} Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages",
year = "2024",
booktitle = "Proc. ACL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.777/"
}
Stephen Bothwell, Brian DuSell, David Chiang, and Brian Krostenko.
PILA: a historical-linguistic dataset of
Proto-
Italic and
Latin.
In
Proc. LREC-COLING, 12749–12760. 2024.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bothwell+:2024,
author = "Bothwell, Stephen and DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David and Krostenko, Brian",
title = "{PILA}: A Historical-Linguistic Dataset of {P}roto-{I}talic and {L}atin",
booktitle = "Proc. LREC-COLING",
pages = "12749--12760",
year = "2024",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1116/"
}
Lena Strobl, William Merrill, Gail Weiss, David Chiang, and Dana Angluin.
What formal languages can transformers express?
A survey.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 12:543–561, 2024.
doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00663.
DOI
BibTeX
@article{strobl-etal-2024-survey,
author = "Strobl, Lena and Merrill, William and Weiss, Gail and Chiang, David and Angluin, Dana",
title = "What Formal Languages Can Transformers Express? {A} Survey",
year = "2024",
journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
volume = "12",
pages = "543--561",
doi = "10.1162/tacl\_a\_00663"
}
Brian DuSell and David Chiang.
Stack attention: improving the ability of transformers to model hierarchical patterns.
In
Proc. ICLR. 2024.
Spotlight paper.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{dusell+chiang:2024attention,
author = "DuSell, Brian and Chiang, David",
title = "Stack Attention: Improving the Ability of Transformers to Model Hierarchical Patterns",
year = "2024",
booktitle = "Proc. ICLR",
url = "https://openreview.net/pdf?id=XVhm3X8Fum"
}
Stephen Bothwell, Justin DeBenedetto, Theresa Crnkovich, Hildegund M
üller, and David Chiang.
Introducing rhetorical parallelism detection: a new task with datasets, metrics, and baselines.
In
Proc. EMNLP, 5007–5039. 2023.
doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.305.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bothwell+:2023,
author = {Bothwell, Stephen and DeBenedetto, Justin and Crnkovich, Theresa and M{\"u}ller, Hildegund and Chiang, David},
title = "Introducing Rhetorical Parallelism Detection: A New Task with Datasets, Metrics, and Baselines",
booktitle = "Proc. EMNLP",
year = "2023",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.305",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.305",
pages = "5007--5039"
}
Aarohi Srivastava and David Chiang.
BERTwich: extending
BERT's capabilities to model dialectal and noisy text.
In
Findings of ACL: EMNLP. 2023.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{srivastava+chiang:2023,
author = "Srivastava, Aarohi and Chiang, David",
title = "{BERTwich}: Extending {BERT}'s Capabilities to Model Dialectal and Noisy Text",
booktitle = "Findings of ACL: EMNLP",
year = "2023",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1037/"
}
Chihiro Taguchi, Yusuke Sakai, Parisa Haghani, and David Chiang.
Universal automatic phonetic transcription into the
International
Phonetic
Alphabet.
In
Proc. INTERSPEECH. 2023.
doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2023-2584.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{taguchi+:2023,
author = "Taguchi, Chihiro and Sakai, Yusuke and Haghani, Parisa and Chiang, David",
title = "Universal Automatic Phonetic Transcription into the {I}nternational {P}honetic {A}lphabet",
booktitle = "Proc. INTERSPEECH",
year = "2023",
url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03917",
doi = "10.21437/Interspeech.2023-2584"
}
David Chiang, Peter Cholak, and Anand Pillay.
Tighter bounds on the expressivity of transformer encoders.
In Andreas Krause, Emma Brunskill, Kyunghyun Cho, Barbara Engelhardt, Sivan Sabato, and Jonathan Scarlett, editors,
Proc. ICML, volume 202 of Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 5544–5562. 2023.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chiang+cholak+pillay:2023,
author = "Chiang, David and Cholak, Peter and Pillay, Anand",
editor = "Krause, Andreas and Brunskill, Emma and Cho, Kyunghyun and Engelhardt, Barbara and Sabato, Sivan and Scarlett, Jonathan",
title = "Tighter Bounds on the Expressivity of Transformer Encoders",
booktitle = "Proc. ICML",
pages = "5544--5562",
year = "2023",
volume = "202",
series = "Proceedings of Machine Learning Research",
pdf = "https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/chiang23a/chiang23a.pdf",
url = "https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/chiang23a.html"
}
David Chiang, Colin McDonald, and Chung
-chieh Shan.
Exact recursive probabilistic programming.
PACMPL, 2023.
doi:10.1145/3586050.
PDF
BibTeX
@article{chiang+mcdonald+shan:2023,
author = "Chiang, David and McDonald, Colin and Shan, Chung{-}chieh",
title = "Exact Recursive Probabilistic Programming",
journal = "PACMPL",
volume = "7",
number = "OOPSLA1",
article = "98",
xmonth = "April",
url = "https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3586050",
year = "2023",
doi = "10.1145/3586050"
}
David Chiang, Alexander M. Rush, and Boaz Barak.
Named tensor notation.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research, January 2023.
PDF
BibTeX
@article{chiang+rush+barak:2023,
author = "Chiang, David and Rush, Alexander M. and Barak, Boaz",
title = "Named Tensor Notation",
year = "2023",
month = "January",
journal = "Transactions on Machine Learning Research",
url = "https://openreview.net/pdf?id=hVT7SHlilx"
}
David Chiang and Peter Cholak.
Overcoming a theoretical limitation of self-attention.
In Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, and Aline Villavicencio, editors,
Proc. ACL, volume 1, 7654–7664. 2022.
doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.527.
PDF
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chiang-cholak-2022-overcoming,
author = "Chiang, David and Cholak, Peter",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and Nakov, Preslav and Villavicencio, Aline",
title = "Overcoming a Theoretical Limitation of Self-Attention",
booktitle = "Proc. ACL",
year = "2022",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.527",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.527",
pages = "7654--7664",
volume = "1"
}
full list
