Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
Department of Linguistics
Boylston Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, 02138

CV: wilcox-cv.pdf
Google Scholar
Twitter: @wegotlieb
Email: wilcoxeg[at]g.harvard.edu

I am a second year PhD student in the department of Linguistics at Harvard University. My primary interest is uncovering what neural network language models learn about syntactic structures, and thinking more broadly about how hierarchical structure may be instantiated in distributed systems. I also do work on recursive models of pragmatics, investigating where they succeed and where they break down. I am affiliated with the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory at MIT and the Meaning and Modality Laboratory at Harvard. Before Grad School I worked as a freelance translator and computational linguist at Transcendent Endeavors . I did my undergraduate work at Stanford University, in the Symbolic Systems program and the Slavic Literature department.

Linguistics(y) Publications
[8] Ethan Wilcox, ​Roger Levy and Richard Futrell. 2019. ​Hierarchical Representation in Neural Language Models: Suppression and Recovery of Expectations. ​ Proceedings of Blackbox NLP at ACL 2019 Forthcoming
[7] Ethan Wilcox Roger Levy and Richard Futrell. 2019. ​What Syntactic Structures block Dependencies in RNN Language Models? ​ Proceedings of CogSci 2019.
[6] Ethan Wilcox​ and Benjamin Spector. 2019. ​The Role of Prior Beliefs in The Rational Speech Act Model of Pragmatics: Exhaustivity as a Case Study​. Proceedings of CogSci 2019
[5] Ethan Wilcox, Peng Qian, Richard Futrell, Miguel Ballesteros, Roger Levy. 2019. Structural Supervision Improves Learning for Non-Local Dependencies. NAACL-HLT 2019
[4] Richard Futrell, Ethan Wilcox, Takashi Morita, Miguel Ballesteros, Roger Levy. 2019. Neural Language Models as Psycholinguistic Subjects: Representation of Syntactic State. NAACL-HLT 2019
[3] Wilcox, Ethan; Levy, Roger; Morita, Takashi; Futrell, Richard. 2018. What do RNN Language Models Learn about the Filler-Gap Dependency? Proceedings of Blackbox NLP at EMNLP 2018
[2] Futrell, Richard; Wilcox, Ethan; Morita, Takashi; Levy, Roger. 2018. RNNs as Psycholinguistic Subjects: Grammatical State and Syntactic Dependency
[1] Wilcox, Ethan. 2015. Revolutionary Linguistics: The Soviet Esperanto Movement, 1917-1938. BA Honors Thesis, Stanford University

Slected Translations
[3] Baunov, Alexander, trans. Lion, Mikhail and Wilcox, Ethan. 2017 Is Putin Losing Control of Russia’s Conservative Nationalists? Foreign Affairs
[2] Baunov, Alexander, trans. Lion, Mikhail and Wilcox, Ethan. 2017. Going to the People--and Back Again: The Changing Shape of the Russian Regime. White Paper, Carnegie Center Moscow
[1] Schvartz, Evgenii, trans. Lion, Mikhail and Wilcox, Ethan. 2016. The Snow Queen. Prod. Dacha Theater, Seattle WA