Ryan Cotterell
Assistant Professor
Studies natural language processing and computational linguistics, including formal language theory of neural language models, morphology and probabilistic models of linguistic structure.
Ryan Cotterell's lab at ETH Zurich works on multilingual, translation & linguistics, large language models and probabilistic & causal inference. 98 papers since 2023, 64 at top venues, mostly ACL and EMNLP. 15 PhD students. 8 alumni.
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 26/ year
- at T1 venues
- 65%
- PhD students
- 15
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 8
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 0 papers2026 · T1 0 · collecting
- 27 papers2025 · T1 14
- 33 papers2024 · T1 18
- 38 papers2023 · T1 32
T1 venuesOtherVenues: ACL, EMNLP, TACL, ICLR, Findings of EMNLP
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Large language models37 papers
- Probabilistic & causal inference6 papers
- linguistic3 papers
- Multilingual, translation & linguistics1 paper
- morphology0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202527 papers
- Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer ScienceA Close Analysis of the Subset Construction (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language TechnologiesA Distributional Perspective on Word Learning in Neural Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language TechnologiesA Practical Method for Generating String Counterfactuals (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)A Spatio-Temporal Point Process for Fine-Grained Modeling of Reading Behavior (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Are Language Models Efficient Reasoners? A Perspective from Logic Programming (opens in a new tab)
- —Better Estimation of the KL Divergence Between Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- —Bigger is not always better: The importance of human-scale language modeling for psycholinguistics (opens in a new tab)
- —Can Language Models Learn Typologically Implausible Languages? (opens in a new tab)
- —Characterizing the Expressivity of Transformer Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Controllable Context Sensitivity and the Knob Behind It (opens in a new tab)
- —Fast Controlled Generation from Language Models with Adaptive Weighted Rejection Sampling (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Gumbel Counterfactual Generation from Language Models (opens in a new tab)
202433 papers
- EMNLP (T1)A Probability--Quality Trade-off in Aligned Language Models and its Relation to Sampling Adaptors (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of NAACLA Transformer with Stack Attention (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPActivation Scaling for Steering and Interpreting Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- CognitionAn information-theoretic analysis of targeted regressions during reading (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)An L* Algorithm for Deterministic Weighted Automata (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPCan Transformer Language Models Learn $n$-gram Language Models? (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Context versus Prior Knowledge in Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- Proceedings of the Society for Computation in LinguisticsCorrelation Does Not Imply Compensation: Complexity and Irregularity in the Lexicon (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational LinguisticsDirect Preference Optimization with an Offset (opens in a new tab)
- ICML (T1)Do Language Models Exhibit the Same Cognitive Biases in Problem Solving as Human Learners? (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPEfficiently Computing Susceptibility to Context in Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPGeneralized Measures of Responsive and Anticipatory Language Processing (opens in a new tab)
202338 papers
- TACL (T1)A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)A Fast Algorithm for Computing Prefix Probabilities (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of ACLA Formal Perspective on Byte-Pair Encoding (opens in a new tab)
- —A Geometric Notion of Causal Probing (opens in a new tab)
- AAAI (T1)A Latent-Variable Model for Intrinsic Probing (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)A Measure-theoretic Characterization of Tight Language Model (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)An Exploration of Left-Corner Transformations (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)An Ordinal Latent Variable Model of Conflict Intensity (opens in a new tab)
- ICML (T1)Controlled Text Generation with Natural Language Instructions (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Convergence and Diversity in the Control Hierarchy (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Discourse-Centric Evaluation of Document-level Machine Translation with a New Densely Annotated Parallel Corpus of Novels (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)Efficient Algorithms for Recognizing Weighted Tree-Adjoining Languages (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went8 listed
Apply to ETH ZurichRolling
Not announced yet
Computer Science Doctorate (D-INFK)
- Round
- Rolling (no deadline)
- Opens
- —
- GRE
- See program page
- English
- Proficiency in written and spoken English
- Fee
- See program page
Confirmed on the program page.
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