Andrew Liu

I am a first-year Masters student in the Computational Linguistics (NLP) Group at the University of Toronto, supervised by Professor Gerald Penn.

I recieved my Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2024. During my undergrad, I had the good fortune to work with Professor Kimon Fountoulakis and Professor Jimmy Lin.

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My research in the past has focused on both interpretability in language models as well as multilingual capabilities of information retrieval systems. Currently I am interested in the interplay between semantics and contexts and how they manifest themselves in embeddings.

Current interpretability techniques identify patterns that are interpretable both syntactically and semantically; however, these patterns do not constitute knowledge.

Despite the large amounts of incidental multilingual texts in training data, they play a very minor role in cross-lingual transfer capabilities.

Influence functions have emerged as a feasible way to assign blame to datapoints. Our findings show influence scores may encode semantics in the same strange way that Sentence-BERT vectors do, and possibly exhibit a higher degree of robustness to semantics-preserving variance.

Teaching Experience

(Fall 2024) TA for CSC110: Foundations of Computer Science @ University of Toronto