Portrait of Sebastian Schuster

Sebastian Schuster

Lecturer


Department of Linguistics
University College London


I am a lecturer (~assistant professor) in computational linguistics at University College London. In mid-2025, I will move to the University of Vienna and start a WWTF-funded research group there.

Before that, I was a postdoc at Saarland University; a postdoc in Linguistics and Data Science at NYU as part of the 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow program, mentored by Tal Linzen; and a PhD student in Linguistics at Stanford and a member of the ALPS lab and the Stanford NLP Group, working with Judith Degen and Chris Manning.

My main research interest is in computational semantics and pragmatics. I build and evaluate computational models of interpreting language in context with two goals in mind: to develop formal and psycholinguistic accounts of pragmatic language use and to develop more reliable natural language understanding systems. Please see my publications to find out more.

Recent News:

  • January 2024: I started a new job as Lecturer in Computatioal Linguistics at UCL.
  • May 2023: Najoung Kim and I presented our work on entity state tracking at ACL 2023.
  • April 2023: Our paper on variability in scalar implicature derivations was accepted to TACL (joint work with Jennifer Hu, Roger Levy, and Judith Degen).
  • Spring 2023: Area Chair for the "Psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and semantic processing" track at *SEM2023.
  • Nov 2022: Invited talk at CLASP in Gothenburg.
  • Oct 2022: Invited talk at the German Society for Computational Linguistics (online).
  • Sep 2022: I started a new job as a postdoctoral researcher in Vera Demberg's group at Saarland University.
  • Jul 2022: I presented joint work with Tal Linzen on entity tracking in language models at NAACL 2022.
  • Spring 2022: Invited talks at DeepMind, FAIR, Saarland University, and the NYU Text as Data Series.
  • Spring 2022: I was a Senior Area Chair for the Language Resources and Evaluation track at NAACL 2022.