Hi. I am an Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Language Science where I lead the Language Processing Group. I study language processing in humans and machines using information theory and Bayesian cognitive modeling. I also work on NLP and AI interpretability.
Papers
* = equal contribution
Working papers
Richard Futrell and Michael Hahn. Linguistic structure from a bottleneck on sequential information processing. arXiv.
Jiaxuan Li and Richard Futrell. Decomposition of surprisal: Unified computational model of ERP components in language processing. arXiv.
2024
Julie Kallini, Isabel Papadimitriou, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Christopher Potts. 2024. Mission: Impossible Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 14691–14714. Winner of ACL Best Paper Award. [code]
Yanting Li, Gregory Scontras, and Richard Futrell. 2024. On the communicative utility of code-switching. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2024, pages 343–349.
Jiaxuan Li and Richard Futrell. 2024. An information-theoretic model of shallow and deep language comprehension. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 5033-5041.
Weijie Xu and Richard Futrell. 2024. A hierarchical Bayesian model for syntactic priming. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 3693-3700.
Richard Futrell. 2024. An information-theoretic account of availability effects in language production. Topics in Cognitive Science 16(1): 38-53. [code]
Weijie Xu and Richard Futrell. 2024. Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 1-9. St. Julian's, Malta. [code]
2023
Richard Futrell. 2023. Information-theoretic principles in incremental language production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120(39): e2220593120. [code]
Richard Futrell. 2023. An information-theoretic account of availability effects in language production. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 71-79. Winner of Best Paper Award for Computational Modeling of Language. [code]
Kyle Mahowald, Evgeniia Diachek, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko, and Richard Futrell. Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages. Cognition 241: 105543.
Charles Torres and Richard Futrell. Simpler neural networks prefer subregular languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1651–1661, Singapore.
Weijie Xu, Jason S. Chon, Tianran Liu, and Richard Futrell. The Linearity of the Effect of Surprisal on Reading Times across Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15711–15721, Singapore. [code]
Manikanta Loya, Divya Sinha, and Richard Futrell. Exploring the Sensitivity of LLMs’ Decision-Making Capabilities: Insights from Prompt Variations and Hyperparameters. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3711–3716, Singapore. [code and data]
William Dyer, Charles Torres, Gregory Scontras, and Richard Futrell. 2023. Evaluating a century of progress on the cognitive science of adjective ordering. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 11: 1185–1200.
Thomas Hikaru Clark, Clara Meister, Tiago Pimentel, Michael Hahn, Ryan Cotterell, Richard Futrell, and Roger Levy. 2023. A cross-linguistic pressure for Uniform Information Density in word order. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 11: 1048–1065. [code and data]
Sihan Chen, Richard Futrell, and Kyle Mahowald. An information-theoretic approach to the typology of spatial demonstratives. Cognition 240: 105505. [code and data]
Ethan G. Wilcox, Richard Futrell, and Roger P. Levy. Using computational models to test syntactic learnability. Linguistic Inquiry.
Huteng Dai, Connor Mayer, and Richard Futrell. 2023. Rethinking representations: A log-bilinear model of phonotactics. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2023, pages 259-268. [code and data]
Jiaxuan Li and Richard Futrell. 2023. A decomposition of surprisal tracks the N400 and P600 brain potentials. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 587-594.
Shiva Upadhye and Richard Futrell. 2023. Typing time PWI: A scalable paradigm for studying lexical production. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 3003-3010.
Yanting Li, Gregory Scontras, and Richard Futrell. 2023. Chinese words shorten in more predictive contexts. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 1286-1291.
2022
Michael Hahn, Richard Futrell, Roger Levy, and Edward Gibson. A resource-rational model of human processing of recursive linguistic structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(43): e2122602119.
Michaela Socolof, Jacob Louis Hoover, Richard Futrell, Alessandro Sordoni, Timothy J. O’Donnell. 2022. Measuring Morphological Fusion Using Partial Information Decomposition. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 44–54. Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.
Huteng Dai and Richard Futrell. 2022. Learning Phonotactics in a Differentiable Framework of Subregular Languages. In Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology.
Richard Futrell and Michael Hahn. 2022. Information theory as a bridge between language function and language form. Frontiers in Communication 7:657725.
Yingtong Liu, Rachel Ryskin, Richard Futrell, and Edward Gibson. 2022. A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English. Cognition 222: 104902.
Himanshu Yadav, Samar Husain, and Richard Futrell. 2022. Assessing corpus evidence for formal and psycholinguistic constraints on nonprojectivity. Computational Linguistics 48 (2): 375–401.
Isabel Papadimitriou, Richard Futrell, and Kyle Mahowald. 2022. When classifying grammatical role, BERT doesn't care about word order... except when it matters. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pp. 636–643.
Richard Futrell. 2022. Estimating word co-occurrence probabilities from pretrained static embedding using a log-bilinear model. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pp. 54–60. [code]
Neil Rathi, Michael Hahn, and Richard Futrell. 2022. Explaining patterns of fusion in morphological paradigms using the memory-surprisal tradeoff. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 184–191. Winner of the Sayan Gul Award for Best Undergraduate Paper.
Zeinab Kachakeche, Gregory Scontras, and Richard Futrell. 2022. The efficiency of dropping vowels in Romanised Arabic script. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1505–1511.
2021
Neil Rathi, Michael Hahn*, and Richard Futrell*. 2021. An information-theoretic characterization of morphological fusion. In EMNLP. [code]
Huteng Dai and Richard Futrell. 2021. Simple induction of (deterministic) probabilistic finite-state automata for phonotactics by stochastic gradient descent. In SIGMORPHON. [code]
Zeinab Kachakeche, Richard Futrell, and Gregory Scontras. Word order affects the frequency of adjective use across languages. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 3006–3012.
William Dyer, Richard Futrell, Zoey Liu, and Gregory Scontras. Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 957–967.
Richard Futrell. 2021. An information-theoretic account of semantic inference in word production. Frontiers in Psychology 12:672408. [code]
Himanshu Yadav, Samar Husain, and Richard Futrell 2021. Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies? Linguistics Vanguard 7(s3): 20190070.
Michael Hahn, Dan Jurafsky, and Richard Futrell. 2021. Sensitivity as a Complexity Measure for Sequence Classification Tasks. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 9:891–908. [code]
Michael Hahn, Judith Degen, and Richard Futrell. 2021. Modeling word and morpheme order in natural language as an efficient tradeoff of memory and surprisal. Psychological Review.
Isabel Papadimitriou, Ethan Chi, Richard Futrell, and Kyle Mahowald. 2021. Deep Subjecthood: Higher-Order Grammatical Features in Multilingual BERT. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2522-2532. [code] [press]
Hannah Rohde, Richard Futrell, and Christopher Lucas. 2021. What's new? A comprehension bias in favor of informativity. Cognition 209: 104491.
Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson, Harry J. Tily, Idan Blank, Anastasia Vishnevetsky, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Evelina Fedorenko. 2021. The Natural Stories corpus: A reading-time corpus of English texts containing rare syntactic constructions. Language Resources and Evaluation 55(1):63-77. [the corpus]
2020
Michael Hahn, Dan Jurafsky, and Richard Futrell. 2020. Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(5): 2347-2353. [code and data] [press]
Richard Futrell, Roger Levy, and Edward Gibson. 2020. Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order. Language 96(2): 371-413. [code]
Richard Futrell, William Dyer, and Gregory Scontras. 2020. What determines the order of adjectives in English? Comparing efficiency-based theories using dependency treebanks. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2003-2012. [code and data]
Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson, and Roger Levy. 2020. Lossy-context surprisal: An information-theoretic model of memory effects in sentence processing. Cognitive Science 44: e12814. [code and data]
Kartik Sharma, Richard Futrell*, and Samar Husain*. 2020. What determines the order of verbal dependents in Hindi? Effects of efficiency in comprehension and production. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 1–10.
Ethan Wilcox, Peng Qian, Richard Futrell, Ryosuke Kohita, Roger P. Levy, and Miguel Ballesteros. Structural Supervision Improves Few-Shot Learning and Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4640–4652.
Veronica Boyce, Richard Futrell, and Roger P. Levy. 2020. Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty. Journal of Memory and Language 111: 104082.
Bevil Conway, Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Richard Futrell, and Edward Gibson. 2020. Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms. Cognition 195: 104086.
Francis Mollica, Matthew Siegelman, Evgeniia Diachek, Steven T. Piantadosi, Zachary Mineroff, Richard Futrell, Hope Kean, Peng Qian, and Evelina Fedorenko. 2020. Composition is the Core Driver of the Language-selective Network. Neurobiology of Language 1(1): 104–134.
2019
Michael Hahn and Richard Futrell. 2019. Estimating predictive rate-distortion curves via neural variational inference. Entropy 21(7): 640. [code]
Richard Futrell. 2019. Information-theoretic locality properties of natural language. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax, pages 2-15.
Himanshu Yadav, Samar Husain*, and Richard Futrell*. 2019. Are formal restrictions on crossing dependencies epiphenomenal? In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theory, pages 2-12. [code]
Richard Futrell, Peng Qian, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko, and Idan Blank. Syntactic dependencies correspond to word pairs with high mutual information. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics, pages 3-13. [code]
Ethan Wilcox, Roger P. Levy, and Richard Futrell. 2019. Hierarchical representation in neural language models: Suppression and recovery of expectations. In Proceedings of BlackboxNLP 2019.
Ethan Wilcox, Roger P. Levy, and Richard Futrell. 2019. What syntactic structures block dependencies in RNN language models? In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), pages 1199-1205.
Yingtong Liu, Rachel Ryskin, Richard Futrell, and Edward Gibson. 2019. Verb frequency explains the unacceptability of factive and manner-of-speaking islands in English. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), pages 685-691.
Richard Futrell, Ethan Wilcox, Takashi Morita, Peng Qian, Miguel Ballesteros and Roger P. Levy. 2019. Neural language models as psycholinguistic subjects: Representations of syntactic state. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 32-42. [code and data] [press]
Ethan Wilcox, Peng Qian, Richard Futrell, Miguel Ballesteros and Roger P. Levy. 2019. Structural supervision improves learning of non-local grammatical dependencies. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3302-3312.
Edward Gibson, Richard Futrell, Steven T. Piantadosi, Isabelle Dautriche, Kyle Mahowald, Leon Bergen, and Roger P. Levy. How efficiency shapes human language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Richard Futrell and Roger P. Levy. 2019. Do RNNs learn human-like abstract word order preferences? In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2019, pages 50-59. [code and data]
2018
Richard Futrell, Ethan Wilcox, Takashi Morita, and Roger P. Levy. 2018. RNNs as psycholinguistic subjects: Syntactic state and grammatical dependency. arXiv abs/1809.01329. [code and data]
Ethan Wilcox, Roger P. Levy, Takashi Morita, and Richard Futrell. 2018. What do RNN language models learn about filler-gap dependencies? In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpretating Neural Networks for NLP, pages 211-221. [code and data]
Rachel Ryskin, Richard Futrell, Swathi Kiran, and Edward Gibson. 2018. Comprehenders model the nature of noise in the environment. Cognition 181: 141-150. [code and data]
Michael Hahn, Judith Degen, Noah Goodman, Dan Jurafsky, and Richard Futrell. 2018. An information-theoretic explanation of adjective ordering preferences. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), pages 1766-1771.
Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson, Hal Tily, Idan Blank, Anastasia Vishnevetsky, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Evelina Fedorenko. 2018. The Natural Stories Corpus. In LREC 2018, pages 76-82. [the corpus]
2017
Edward Gibson, Richard Futrell, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Kyle Mahowald, Leon Bergen, Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam, Mitchell Gibson, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Bevil Conway. 2017. Color naming across languages reflects color use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(40): 10785-10790. [code and data] [some popular press]
Richard Futrell, Roger P. Levy, and Matthew Dryer. A statistical comparison of some theories of NP word order. arXiv abs/1709.02783. [code and data]
Melody Dye, Petar Milin, Richard Futrell, and Michael Ramscar. 2017. Cute little puppies and nice cold beers: An information theoretic analysis of prenominal adjectives. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 319-324. London, UK. Winner of the Marr Prize for Best Student Paper.
Richard Futrell, Roger P. Levy, and Edward Gibson. 2017. Generalizing dependency distance: Comment on "Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages" by Haitao Liu et al. Physics of Life Reviews 21: 197–199.
Richard Futrell and Roger P. Levy. 2017. Noisy-context surprisal as a human sentence processing cost model. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 688–698. Valencia, Spain. [code]
Richard Futrell, Adam Albright, Peter Graff, and Timothy J. O'Donnell. 2017. A generative model of phonotactics. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 5: 73–86.
Melody Dye, Petar Milin, Richard Futrell, and Michael Ramscar. 2017. A functional theory of gender paradigms. In F. Kiefer, J.P. Blevins, & H. Bartos (Eds.) Perspectives on Morphological Organization: Data and Analyses. Brill: Leiden.
Edward Gibson, Caitlin Tan, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, Lars Konieczny, Barbara Hemforth, and Evelina Fedorenko. 2017. Don't underestimate the benefits of being misunderstood. Psychological Science: 1–10.
2016
Cory Shain, Marten van Schijndel, Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson, and William Schuler. 2016. Memory access during incremental sentence processing causes reading time latency. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), pages 49–58.
Kyle Mahowald, Ariel James, Richard Futrell, and Edward Gibson. 2016. A meta-analysis of syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 91: 5–27. [data]
Richard Futrell and Edward Gibson. 2016. L2 processing as noisy channel language comprehension. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. [This is a brief response to Cunnings (2016)]
Richard Futrell, Laura Stearns, Daniel L. Everett, Steven T. Piantadosi*, and Edward Gibson*. 2016. A corpus investigation of syntactic embedding in Pirahã. PLOS ONE 11(3): e0145289. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145289 [version with better formatting of glosses] [the corpus]
2015
Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. 2015. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(33): 10336–10341. [some popular press] [two responses] [our response] [code]
Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. 2015. Quantifying word order freedom in dependency corpora. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015), pages 91–100.
Richard Futrell and Edward Gibson. 2015. Experiments with generative models for dependency tree linearization. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1978–1983.
Richard Futrell, Tina Hickey, Aldrin Lee, Eunice Lim, Elena Luchkina, and Edward Gibson. 2015. Cross-linguistic gestures reflect typological universals: A subject-initial, verb-final bias in speakers of diverse languages. Cognition 136: 215–221.
Stephanie Shih, Jason Grafmiller, Richard Futrell, and Joan Bresnan. 2015. Rhythm's role in the genitive construction choice in spoken English. In R. Vogel and R. van de Vijver (eds). Rhythm in Cognition and Grammar: A Germanic Perspective. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. 207–234.
Theses
Memory and Locality in Natural Language. 2017. MIT. PhD thesis with Ted Gibson and Roger Levy.
Processing Effects of the Expectation of Informativity. 2012. Stanford University. Master's thesis with Hannah Rohde and Dan Jurafsky.
German Grammatical Gender as a Nominal Protection Device. 2010. Stanford University. Senior thesis with Dan Jurafsky and Michael Ramscar.
Selected Presentations
(* = presented in person)
* Richard Futrell and Timothy J. O'Donnell. 2017. A generative model of phonotactics. MIT Workshop on Simplicity in Grammar Learning, 9/23/2017. [video]
* Richard Futrell. 2017. Information locality in natural language. Lightning talk at the Workshop on Executive Functions and Language Processing, MIT, 5/25/2017. [video]
* Richard Futrell and Roger Levy. 2017. Noisy-context surprisal as a human sentence processing cost model. Talk at CUNY 2017, 3/30/2017. [video]
* Richard Futrell. 2017. Comment on Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication. Commentary on Terry Regier's talk at the Pre-CUNY Workshop "Searching for cognitive universals: evidence from remote societies", 3/29/2017. [video]
* Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. 2016. Crosslinguistic investigations in quantitative syntax: Dependency length and beyond. Talk at Edinburgh Center for Language Evolution.
* Richard Futrell, Adam Albright, Peter Graff, and Timothy J O'Donnell. 2016. Subsegmental structure facilitates learning of phonotactic distributions. Presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, D.C.
Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. 2014. CLIQS: Crosslinguistic Investigations in Quantitative Syntax. Poster presented at AMLaP 2014.
* Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, Steve Piantadosi, and Edward Gibson. 2014. Efficient Communication Forwards and Backwards. Poster presented at CUNY 2014.
* Richard Futrell and Michael Ramscar. 2012. German grammatical gender contributes to communicative efficiency. Presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland.
* Richard Futrell and Michael Ramscar. 2011. German grammatical gender manages nominal entropy. Poster presented at the Workshop on Information-Theoretic Approaches to Linguistics, July, University of Colorado, Boulder.
* Michael Ramscar and Richard Futrell. 2011. The predictive function of prenominal adjectives. Poster presented at the Workshop on Information-Theoretic Approaches to Linguistics, July, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Manuscripts
Richard Futrell and Sam Bowman. 2012. Measuring Amok. Term paper for Stanford CS224U: Natural Language Understanding.
Richard Futrell. 2012. And the Context Shall Make You Free: Bleaching as Blocking in a Discrimination Learning Model of Grammaticalization in the Critical Context. Term paper for Elizabeth Traugott's class on Constructionalization.
Richard Futrell. 2010. Predicting Gaps: Exploring Distributional Explanations for the Accessibility Hierarchy. Term paper.