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 and nlp, often interfacing with logic, epistemology, and cognitive psychology. My dissertation committee is: Christopher Potts (chair), Cleo Condoravdi (chair), and Thomas Icard. 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:

Mar 2026: New paper Mirativity on the Table (co-author: Veda Kanamarlapudi) now out.

Mar 2026: Very fortunate to have had the chance to edit the Proceedings volume for FASAL 15.

Mar 2026: For the Spring Quarter, I am a TA for LINGUIST 130A: Intro to Semantics & Pragmatics.

Dec 2025: I successfully defended my dissertation proposal.

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

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

Papers:

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

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

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.

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 am trained in Hindustani classical music (vocals). Although forever partial to the Raags Yaman and Kedar, presently, I am listening a lot to Hamsadhwani and Gaud Sarang. I also read a lot of art criticism. Here's an essay by Susan Sontag that I find validating for my sensibilities.

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.