About
Hello! My name is Ruoqing Yao (姚若轻). I am a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department at UC Santa Cruz. Before joining UCSC, I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Linguistics from William & Mary in 2023. I am originally from Beijing, China.
Research
I work on psycholingusitics and computational linguistics. My main research interest is how human and LLMs process dependencies in languages, such as filler-gap dependency, subject-verb agreement, etc. My primary advisor is Matt Wagers.
At the moment I'm exploring the representation of filler-gap dependency in LLMs, especially in the attention mechanism. This work has been primarily advised by Pranav Anand. I'm also working on the effect of intervening clausal boundaries in processing filler-gap dependencies. In the past, I've worked on the ambiguity advantage effect (QP1 and undergraduate thesis) and the satiation effect of island-violating sentences(CSLI summer project). I've worked with the Transient-Binding Model (Keshev et al., 2025) on item representation in memory, collaborating with Matthew Kogan.
Publications
2026
Yao, R., & Anand, P. Probing the Attention Representation of Filler-Gap Dependency in Transformers. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026 (pp. 258-261).
2025
Yao, R., Wagers, M. Who and when gets the race? Two processing routes for the advantages and penalties of pronominal ambiguity resolution. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. San Francisco, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2023
Yao, R., Referential resolution for resumptive pronouns in island-violating sentences. William & Mary Undergraduate Honors Thesis. Williamsburg, VA. (accessible here (PDF))
Oral Presentations
2026
Yao, R., Anand, P. Probing the Attention Representation of Filler-Gap Dependency in Transformers. Society of Computation in Linguistics, Workshop at The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. San Diego, CA. July 3-4, 2026
Kogan, M, Borra, A., Yao, R., Wagers, M., Syntactic positional similarity modulates interference for thematic and agreement dependencies. Long Talk at the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) 39, MIT. March 2026.
2025
Kogan, M*, Yao, R.*, Modeling interference with distributed representations of lexical, morphological, and positional information. Short Talk at the Bay Area Language Processing Interest Group (BAyLI), Univeristy of California, Santa Cruz, CA. October 10.
2024
Yao, R., Lu, J., Degen, J. Perceived interpretability predicts satiability for CNPC islands but not WH islands. California Meeting on Psycholinguistics. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. January 14.
Yao, R., Hogoboom, A. Resumptive Pronouns in Islands Show Confusability Advantage Effect. 2024 Linguistics Society of America Annual Meeting. New York City, NY. January 7.
2023
Yao, R. The Processing of Resumptive Pronouns in Islands. Graduate and Honors Research Symposium. William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA. March 30.
Posters
2026
Yao, R.,Anand, P., France, A., Hauseman, H., Wagers, M., Reynaga, J. Analyzing the quality of LLM-assisted summary writing. Poster at the 67th Psychonomics Society Annual Meeting. San Diego, CA. November 19-22
Reynaga, J., Anand, P., France, A., Hauseman, H., Wagers, M., Yao, R. LLM-Assisted Writing and Students’ Perceptions of AI Support. Poster at the 67th Psychonomics Society Annual Meeting. San Diego, CA. November 19-22.
2025
Yao, R., Wagers, M. Who and when gets the race? Two processing routes for the advantages and penalties of pronominal ambiguity resolution. Poster at The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, San Francisco, CA. July 30-Aug 2.
Yao, R., Wagers, M. Who Gets to Race? The Effect of Initial Bias on Pronominal Ambiguity Advantage. Poster at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. University of Maryland, College Park, MD. March 27–29. [poster (PDF)]
2022
Parker, D., Glauser, C., Rust, G., Wright, N., Yao, R. Antecedent reactivation leads to faster retrieval: Evidence from ellipsis. Poster at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. March 24–26.
Yao, R. Satiability and Interpretability. Poster at the W&M 2022 Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium. William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA. September 30.
Curriculum Vitae
You can find my CV here:
Open CV (PDF)Contact
- Email: ryao10 [at] ucsc [dot] edu
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruoqing-yao-8161121a2/
Other
- I play table tennis. I am a member of UCSC Table Tennis Club and was the Team Captain in the 25-26 season. I previously served as the President of William & Mary Club Table Tennis between 2021-2023. You can often find me playing at the table tennis area in East Field Gym with the club.
- IPA for my name: [jɑ̌ʊ35 ɻû̯ɔ51 t͡ɕʰíŋ55]