Ahmad Jabbar

jabbar@stanford.edu

I am a PhD candidate at Stanford Linguistics and a member of the Stanford NLP Group. I work on Semantics, Computational Linguistics, and Philosophy of Language, often interfacing with Logic, Epistemology, Syntax, and Cognitive Psychology. My dissertation committee is: Christopher Potts (chair), Cleo Condoravdi (chair), and Thomas Icard. As an undergrad, I read Philosophy.

With Jasper Jian, I co-organize a group at the intersection of language modeling and linguistic theory. With Cleo Condoravdi, I co-organized the Construction of Meaning workshop in 2024-25.

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.

Papers:

Veda Kanamarlapudi.^* & Ahmad Jabbar.^* 2026. Mirativity on the Table. Proceedings of the 15th Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 15).

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

Sunny Yu; Myra Cheng; Ahmad Jabbar; Ilia Sucholutsky; Katherine Collins; Dan Jurafsky; Robert Hawkins 2026. Cognitive offloading and the speedup illusion in human-AI interaction. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48.

Sunny Yu; Myra Cheng; Ahmad Jabbar; Ilia Sucholutsky; Katherine Collins; Dan Jurafsky; Robert Hawkins 2026. The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks. Preprint.

Puyin Li^; Jiyuan Tan^; Ahmad Jabbar; Thomas Icard; and Atticus Geiger. 2026. Bucketing the good apples: a method for diagnosing and improving causal abstraction. Preprint.

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

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

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

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

Ahmad Jabbar. 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

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

Other work:

Sampada Deshpande; Ahmad Jabbar; Jonathan Paramore; Shaunak Phadnis (Eds.). 2026. Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages.

Ahmad Jabbar. 2025. Conditional Rhetorical Questions Presented at Berkeley Syntax & Semantics Circle and Linguistic Society of America 2024 (talk).

Ahmad Jabbar.^* & Veda Kanamarlapudi.^* 2024. The Hindi-Urdu bhala: Subordinating Highlighted Propositions Presented at Polar Question Meaning(s) across Languages (University of Amsterdam) (talk) and Chicago Linguistic Society 60 (talk).