Research Orientation

I studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, completing both my undergraduate and master’s degrees at Gonville & Caius College. Over time, my interests shifted away from formal descriptions of language toward questions of acquisition: how structure arises without explicit instruction, how learning proceeds unevenly, and how competence is gradually assembled rather than suddenly attained.

I am currently supervised by Professor Paula Buttery. My doctoral research examines how grammatical and semantic structure emerges in compact neural systems trained under multilingual and data-limited conditions.

Much of machine learning research is organised around endpoints: benchmarks, leaderboards, final accuracy. My own work is motivated by a discomfort with this framing.

I approach language models instead as epistemic artefacts, focusing on learning dynamics rather than end states, and drawing on tools from psychometrics and developmental psychology—such as item response theory.

Small language models are not merely scaled-down versions of larger ones. Their value lies less in what they achieve than in what they make intelligible.