Ahmad Jabbar

jabbar@stanford.edu

I am a third-year PhD candidate at Stanford Linguistics. I work on semantics, nlp, syntax, and psycholinguistics. I am currently advised by Christopher Potts, Cleo Condoravdi, and Thomas Icard.

In my theoretical semantics and syntax work, I build algebraic models for discourse particles, clause-types, modals, and conditionals. On the computational and cognitive side, I primarily work on compositional generalization; I analyze the distributional properties of the training data that give rise to different behaviors in language models and humans.

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

Goings on:

Mar 2025: I will be presenting my work on the semantics of conditional rhetorical questions at Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle.

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

Feb 2025: Co-authored abstract with Veda Kanamarlapudi on yet another discourse particle got accepted at FASAL 15.

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

Apr 2024: I co-presented a talk on a puzzling discourse particle with Veda Kanamarlapudi at CLS 60.

Apr 2024: I presented a talk on the polarity question particle kya at FASAL 14.

Apr 2024: I co-presented a talk with Veda Kanamarlapudi on a discourse particle at the Polar Question Meaning across languages workshop (Amsterdam).

Jan 2024: For the Winter quarter, I was a TA for LINGUIST130A/230A: Intro to Semantics & Pragmatics.

Jan 2024: 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 2023: 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.