Ahmad Jabbar

jabbar@stanford.edu

I am a PhD student at Stanford Linguistics. I am interested in formal semantic theory, LLMs, their intersection, and accompanying philosophical issues. My work in semantics focuses on clause-types, modals, conditionals, and discourse particles. On the computational side, I am primarily interested in compositional generalization. My previous degrees are in logic and philosophy.

Goings on:

Sep: For the Autumn quarter, I am a TA for LINGUIST145/PSYCH140: Intro to Psycholinguistics (Instructor: Cory Shain).

Apr: I co-presented a talk on a puzzling discourse particle with Veda Kanamarlapudi at CLS 60.

Apr: I presented a talk on the polarity question particle kya at FASAL 14.

Apr: I co-presented a talk with Veda Kanamarlapudi on a discourse particle at the Polar Question Meaning across languages workshop (Amsterdam).

Jan: For the Winter quarter, I was a TA for LINGUIST130A/230A: Intro to Semantics & Pragmatics.

Jan: I presented a talk titled Rhetorical conditional questions at the centennial LSA meeting. I also co-presented a poster, Grounding moves in Hindi-Urdu dialogue, with Veda Kanamarlapudi. This poster builds on our paper Grounding with particles that we recently presented at SemDial.

Nov: I defended my first qualifying paper. I am grateful to my committee, Christopher Potts (chair), Cleo Condoravdi, and Thomas Icard.

Research:

Jabbar, Ahmad. 2023. The Hindi-Urdu NA and reasonable inference Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 59).

Jabbar, Ahmad. & Kanamarlapudi, Veda. 2023. Grounding with particles Proceedings of the 27th workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 27).

Jabbar, Ahmad. & Yadav, Pravaal. 2023. Accepting and resisting inquiry Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 59).

Jabbar, Ahmad. 2021. Pluralism for Relativists: a new framework for context-dependence Proceedings of the 18th workshop of the Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS). 18: 3-16.
reprinted in New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2021

Jabbar, Ahmad. 2021. Relativist know: wh-complements and intermediate exhaustivity Proceedings of the 32nd European Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI). 32: 142-53.

Misc:

I have designed and taught formal logic courses at UConn (CT, USA) and LUMS (Lahore, PK). Another tidbit: I am trained in Hindustani classical music (vocals). My favorite raags are Kedar and Yaman.

If you're an undergrad or high school student (anywhere in the world) and interested in any of the topics I work on, feel free to reach out.