TextGroup
Dongyeop Kang
University of Minnesota – CS & Engineering
Builds human-centric NLP systems through cognitively-aligned models and interactive AI. Research bridges language and cognition to support reading, writing, and reasoning at scale.
Selected works
- Mary, the Cheeseburger-Eating Vegetarian: Do LLMs Recognize Incoherence? – EACL 2026
- Strong Memory, Weak Control: Executive Functioning in LLMs – EACL 2026
- How LLMs Comprehend Temporal Meaning in Narratives – ACL 2025
Varun Athilat
University of Minnesota – Educational Psychology
Studies the interplay between text and emotion — how language shapes how we feel, and how feelings shape how we read. Research spans multiple-document comprehension, persuasion, and typographical cues as proxies for prosody.
Sashank Varma
Georgia Tech – School of Interactive Computing
Cognitive scientist investigating the alignment between how humans and Large Language Models understand language and perform cognitive tasks. Uses computational modeling and behavioral experiments.
Selected works
- Modeling story-based analogy understanding using LLMs – CogSci 2025
- Incremental comprehension of garden-path sentences by LLMs – CogSci 2024
- Development of cognitive intelligence in pre-trained language models – EMNLP 2024
Evelyn Milburn
North Dakota State University – Psychology
Investigates how we use knowledge beyond words to flexibly comprehend real-life language, including figurative language, language learning, and cognitive aging. Runs the Experimental Cognition and Language Lab at NDSU.
Selected works
- Native speakers kick buckets but learners kick doors – Memory & Cognition, 2026
- Online processing of anomalous learner syntax – Applied Psycholinguistics, 2023
- Idioms show effects of meaning relatedness and dominance – Psychonomic Bulletin, 2019
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