Surya Chinnappa

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Cognitive Science at Brown University, advised by Roman Feiman and Ellie Pavlick. I earned my B.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Chicago.

My interests broadly concern the representation of meaning in minds and computational systems. Questions that arise in this area include:

• What are the mental faculties underlying compositionality?
• How is the lexicon structured in the mind and brain?
• What aspects of meaning are inseparable from human experience and which can be made amodal?

I integrate training in linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, logic & theoretical computer science, and machine learning to address these issues from all angles.

My undergraduate honors thesis, advised by Chris Kennedy, uses diachronic word embeddings to hunt for distributional signatures of a proposed law of unidirectional semantic change governing the metaphoric extension of synesthetic adjectives. Other work includes text analysis within the Compelling Preaching project at the Center for Practical Wisdom and APEX Lab, under Howard Nusbaum, and the development of a benchmark assessing LLMs' ability to recognize pragmatic felicity conditions and respond effectively to infelicitous utterances.

When I'm not thinking about words or talking about thinking, you'll likely find me making music—whether playing violin or any of a host of tiny flutes, singing sean-nós, or songwriting. Other hobbies include origami, constructed language, and calligraphy.