About me

Hi! I am Yuekun. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University, working with Prof. Huan Sun. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University, where I worked with Prof. Alexander Koller. I was also part of the Computational Linguistics Group. In the past, I obtained my M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Before that, I earned my B.S. 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.

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

• Can NLP models or LLMs perform human-like generalization, and why? [1], [2] [3]
• How to improve models' compositional generalization ability? [4]
• How to build trustworthy models that generalize reliably? Can we train one model (discriminator) to judge the outputs of another model (parser)? [5]

Publications [Google Scholar][Semantic Scholar]

2025

2024

2023

2022

2020

Contact me

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