About me

Hi! I am Yuekun Yao, a Ph.D. student in Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University working with Prof. Alexander Koller. I am a part of Computational Linguistic Group. In the past, I got my MSc degree in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Before that, I did my BS in computer science at East China Normal University.

The main research question I am interested in is How does NLP models generalize to unfamiliar data and how can we improve it? I investigate out-of-distribution generalization with a focus on compositional generalization to bridge the gap between training and test distributions in realistic applications. I am also interested in trustworthiness of NLP models to detect their generalization errors when deployed in real-world settings.

My work aims to both understand model behaviours and develop more effective and reliable NLP models through the following research questions.

• Can NLP models perform human-like generalization, and why? [1] Does this also apply to large language models? [2]
• How to improve models' compositional generalization ability with general-purpose models (seq2seq)? [3]
• How to build trustworthy models that generalize reliably? Can we train one model (discriminator) to judge the outputs of another model (parser)? [4]

Publications [Google Scholar][Semantic Scholar]

2025

2024 2023 2022 2020

Contact me

ykyao [dot] cs [at] gmail [dot] com