I am a PhD student at Yale working with Professor Tom McCoy. My current research interests, roughly, are in understanding how neural networks work as models of language/cognition, and how they compare to humans. I believe that this line of work can help build AI models that are more robust, aligned to human processing, and as a result more practically useful. Much of this interest is also fueled by my interest in analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of language.
Before Yale, I was at Brown where I did applied math-computer science and engineering. Before that, I was a mechanical engineering and statistics double major at Rutgers University (from which I transferred). And even before that, I spent two years by the Bristol Channel at UWC Atlantic.
Besides academic stuff, I enjoy cycling and kendo. I also listen to JPop. You can find my (heavily opinionated) playlist here.
I’m generally happy to talk about research as well as my interests/experiences in general. Feel free to shoot me an email at !
Note: My name is written as Zhang Enyan for academic work. Part of the reason is that this is how it appears in Chinese (family name first), but also that unlike most European languages, Chinese given names are unique, while last names are widely shared and not very indicative of family heritage (e.g. there are roughly 87 million people with my last name in mainland China).
Publications
\lambda\:\leftrightarrow Co-first
Are LLMs Models of Distributional Semantics? A Case Study on QuantifiersZhang Enyan^{\,\lambda}, Zewei Wang^{\,\lambda}, Michael A. Lepori, Ellie Pavlick, Helena Aparicio Under Review
[arXiv]
Zhang Enyan, Michael A. Lepori, Ellie Pavlick
Under Review
[arXiv, Code]
