Ahmad Jabbar

jabbar@stanford.edu

I am a PhD candidate at Stanford Linguistics. I work on semantics, nlp, logic, and cognitive psychology. I am advised by Christopher Potts and Cleo Condoravdi. I also work closely with Thomas Icard.

In my semantics work, I build symbolic models for discourse particles, clause-types, modals, and conditionals. On the computational side, I work on compositional generalization and interpretability. As an undergrad, I read Philosophy.

With Cleo Condoravdi, I co-organize the Construction of Meaning workshop. With Jasper Jian, I co-organize a group at the intersection of language modeling and linguistic theory.

Goings on:

Nov 2025: I presented Distinguishing fair from unfair compositional generalization tasks (co-authors: Christopher Potts and Cleo Condoravdi) at EMNLP 2025.

Apr 2025: I co-presented a paper with Veda Kanamarlapudi on modeling Mirativity within scoreboard models at the Discourse Dynamics Workshop at FASAL 15.

Mar 2025: I presented my work on the semantics of conditional rhetorical questions at Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle. Slides available here.

Feb 2025: I defended my second qualifying paper. I am very grateful to my committee, Christopher Potts (chair), Cleo Condoravdi, and Thomas Icard.

Sep 2024: For the Autumn quarter, I was a TA for LINGUIST145/PSYCH140: Intro to Psycholinguistics (Instructor: Cory Shain).

Papers:

Jabbar, Ahmad; Cleo Condoravdi; and Christopher Potts. 2025. Distinguishing fair from unfair compositional generalization tasks. Findings of EMNLP.

Yu, Sunny; Ahmad Jabbar; Robert Hawkins; Dan Jurafsky; and Myra Cheng. 2025. Generation Space Size: Understanding and Calibrating Open-Endedness of LLM Generations. Preprint.

Kanamarlapudi, Veda. & Ahmad Jabbar. 2025. Mirativity on the table. To appear in Proceedings of the 15th Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 15).

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

Jabbar, Ahmad. & Pravaal Yadav. 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.