selected publications

2025
  1. Unzipping the causality of Zipf’s Law and other lexical trade-offs. Amanda Doucette, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Morgan Sonderegger In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2025).. Albuquerque, NM. 2025.
  2. Fast Controlled Generation from Language Models with Adaptive Weighted Rejection Sampling. Benjamin Lipkin, Benjamin LeBrun, Jacob Hoover Vigly, João Loula, Dadiv MacIver, Leo Du, Jason Eisner, Ryan Cotterell, Vikash K. Mansinghka, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Alexander K. Lew, and Tim Vieira In Proceedings of the Second Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025). Montréal, QC, Canada. 2025.
  3. Syntactic and semantic control of large language models via sequential Monte Carlo. João Loula, Benjamin LeBrun, Leo Du, Benjamin Lipkin, Clemente Pasti, Gabriel Grand, Tianyu Liu, Yahya Emara, Marjorie Freedman, Jason Eisner, Ryan Cotterell, Vikash K. Mansinghka, Alexander K. Lew, Tim Vieira, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025). 2025.
  4. Reframing linguistic bootstrapping as joint inference using visually-grounded grammar induction models Eva Portelance, Siva Reddy, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Journal of Memory and Language. 2025.
  5. The idiom processing advantage is explained by surprisal. Michaela Socolof, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Michael Wagner Cognitive Science. 2025.
  6. From language models over tokens to language models over characters Tim Vieira, Benjamin LeBrun, Mario Giulianelli, Juan Luis Gastaldi, Brian DuSell, John Terilla, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Ryan Cotterell In Proceedings of the Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025). Vancouver, CA. 2025. [link]
  7. Modeling Open-World Cognition as On-Demand Synthesis of Probabilistic Models Lio Wong, Katherine M. Collins, Lance Ying, Cedegao E. Zhang, Tobias Gerstenberg, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Alexander K. Lew, Jacob Andreas, Taylor Brooke-Wilson, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum In Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2025). San Francisco, CA. 2025.
2024
  1. Investigating the universality of consonant and vowel co-occurrence restriction Amanda Doucette, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Heather Goad, and Morgan Sonderegger Glossa: A journal of general linguistics. 2024.
  2. Correlation does not imply compensation: Complexity and irregularity in the lexicon Amanda Doucette, Ryan Cotterell, Morgan Sonderegger, and Timothy J. O’Donnell 2024.
  3. Learning generative population models from multiple clinical datasets via probabilistic programming. João Loula, Katherine M. Collins, Uli Schaechtle, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, A. Weller, Feras Saad, Vikash K. Mansinghka, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the ICML 2024 Workshop on Efficient and Accessible Foundation Models for Biological Discovery. 2024.
2023
  1. What are we talking about? Clarifying the fuzzy concept of representation in neuroscience and beyond. Francis T. Fallon, Tomás J. Ryan, John W. Krakauer, Rosa Cao, David A. Haig, Yohan J. John, Celeste Kidd, Kevin J. Mitchell, Melanie Mitchell, Lorina Naci, Timothy J. O’Donnell, James R. O’Shea, Fionn O’Sullivan, Rebecca Wheeler, Daniel C. Dennett, and Mark Sprevak The Transmitter. 2023.
  2. The plausibility of sampling as a algorithmic model of human sentence processing Jacob L. Hoover, Morgan Sonderegger, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Open Mind. 350–391. 2023. [link]
2022
  1. Simplicity and learning to distinguish arguments from modifiers Leon Bergen, Edward Gibson, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Journal of Language Modeling. 241–286. 2022.
  2. Synthesizing theories of human language with Bayesian program induction Kevin Ellis, Adam Albright, Armando Solar-Lezama, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Nature Communications. 1–13. 2022. [link]
  3. Evaluating distributional distortion in neural language modeling Benjamin LeBrun, Alessandro Sordoni, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022). 2022. [link]
  4. Measuring morphological fusion using partial information decomposition Michaela Socolof, Jacob L. Hoover, Alessandro Sordoni, Richard Futrell, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022). 2022.
  5. Characterizing idioms: Conventionality and contingency Michaela Socolof, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Michael Wagner, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022). Dublin, Ireland. 2022. [link]
2021
  1. Systematic Generalization with Edge Transformers Leon Bergen, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Dzmitry Bahdanau In Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021). 2021.
  2. Systematic generalization with Edge Transformers Leon Bergen, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Dzmitry Bahdanau In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021). 2021. [link]
  3. Jointly learning truth-conditional denotations and groundings using parallel attention Leon Bergen, Dzmitry Bahdanau, and Timothy J. O’Donnell arXiv. 2021. [link]
  4. Linguistic Dependencies and Statistical Dependence Jacob L. Hoover, Wenyu Du, Alessandro Sordoni, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. 2021.
  5. Linguistic dependencies and statistical dependence Jacob L. Hoover, Wenyu Du, Alessandro Sordoni, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021). Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Nov, 2021. [link]
2020
  1. CLOSURE: Assessing Systematic Generalization of CLEVR Models Dzmitry Bahdanau, Harm Vries, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Shikhar Murty, Philippe Beaudoin, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville arXiv. 2020.
  2. CLOSURE: Assessing systematic generalization of CLEVR models Dzmitry Bahdanau, Harm Vries, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Shikhar Murty, Philippe Beaudoin, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville arXiv. 2020. [link]
  3. Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Better Language Modeling: A Syntactic Distance Approach Wenyu Du, Zhouhan Lin, Yikang Shen, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Yoshua Bengio, and Yue Zhang In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Seattle, Washington. 2020.
  4. Exploiting syntactic structure for better language modeling: A syntactic distance approach Wenyu Du, Zhouhan Lin, Yikang Shen, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Yoshua Bengio, and Yue Zhang In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020). Online. 2020. [link]
  5. The Jazz Harmony Treebank Daniel Harasim, C. Finkensiep, P. Ericson, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Montreal, Canada. 2020.
  6. The Jazz Harmony Treebank Daniel Harasim, C. Finkensiep, P. Ericson, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2020). Montreal, Canada. 2020. [link]
  7. Statistical Evidence for Learnable Lexical Subclasses in Japanese Takashi Morita, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Linguistic Inquiry. 2020.
  8. Statistical evidence for learnable lexical subclasses in Japanese Takashi Morita, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Linguistic Inquiry. 87–120. 2020. [link]
  9. Recursive Top-Down Production for Sentence Generation with Latent Trees Shawn Tan, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Alessandro Sordoni, and Aaron Courville In Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2020.
  10. Recursive top-down production for sentence generation with latent trees Shawn Tan, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Alessandro Sordoni, and Aaron Courville In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020. 2020. [link]
2019
  1. Harmonic Syntax in Time: Rhythm Improves Grammatical Models of Harmony Daniel Harasim, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier Under Review. 2019.
  2. Harmonic syntax in time: Rhythm improves grammatical models of harmony Daniel Harasim, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier 2019. [link]
  3. A thousand studies for the price of one: Accelerating psychological science with Pushkin. Joshua K. Hartshorne, Josh Leeuw, Mariela Jennings, Noah D. Goodman, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Behavioral Research Methods. 2019.
  4. A thousand studies for the price of one: Accelerating psychological science with Pushkin. Joshua K. Hartshorne, Josh Leeuw, Mariela Jennings, Noah D. Goodman, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Behavioral Research Methods. 2019. [link]
  5. Universality and diversity in human song Samuel A. Mehr, Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Daniel M. Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Stephanie Atwood, Christopher Lucas, Nori Jacoby, Alena A. Egner, Erin J. Hopkins, Rhea M. Howard, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Steven Pinker, Max M. Krasnow, and Luke Glowacki Science. 2019.
  6. Universality and diversity in human song Samuel A. Mehr, Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Daniel M. Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Stephanie Atwood, Christopher Lucas, Nori Jacoby, Alena A. Egner, Erin J. Hopkins, Rhea M. Howard, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Steven Pinker, Max M. Krasnow, and Luke Glowacki Science. 1–17. 2019. [link]
  7. Morphological Irregularity Correlates with Frequency Shijie Wu, Ryan Cotterell, and Timothy J. O’Donnell 5117–5126. 2019.
  8. Morphological irregularity correlates with frequency Shijie Wu, Ryan Cotterell, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019). 2019. [link]
  9. Five ways in which computational models can help advancing Artificial Grammar Learning research Willem H. Zuidema, Robert M. French, Raquel G. Alhama, Kevin Ellis, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Tim Sainburg, and Timothy Q. Gentner Topics in Cognitive Science. 1–17. 2019.
  10. Five ways in which computational models can help advancing Artificial Grammar Learning research Willem H. Zuidema, Robert M. French, Raquel G. Alhama, Kevin Ellis, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Tim Sainburg, and Timothy Q. Gentner Topics in Cognitive Science. 1–17. 2019. [link]
2018
  1. A maximum likelihood model for the harmonic analysis of symbolic music. Colin C. Aitken, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier In Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference. 2018.
  2. A maximum likelihood model for the harmonic analysis of symbolic music Colin C. Aitken, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Martin Rohrmeier In Proceedings of the 15th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2018). Limassol, Cyprus. 2018.
  3. A generalized parsing framework for generative models of harmonic syntax Daniel Harasim, Martin Rohrmeier, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). Paris, France. 2018.
  4. A generalized parsing framework for generative models of harmonic syntax Daniel Harasim, Martin Rohrmeier, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2018). Paris, France. 2018. [link]
2017
  1. A Generative Model of Phonotactics Richard Futrell, Adam Albright, Peter Graff, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 73–86. 2017. [link]
  2. A generative model of phonotactics Richard Futrell, Adam Albright, Peter Graff, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 73–86. 2017. [link]
  3. Evaluating hierarchies of verb argument structure with hierarchical clustering Jesse Mu, Joshua K. Hartshorne, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Copenhagen, Denmark. 2017.
  4. Evaluating hierarchies of verb argument structure with hierarchical clustering Jesse Mu, Joshua K. Hartshorne, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2017). Copenhagen, Denmark. 2017. [link]
2016
  1. Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language Joshua K. Hartshorne, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Yasutada Sudo, Miki Uruwashi, Miseon Lee, and Jesse Snedeker Cognition. 268–2888. 2016.
  2. Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language Joshua K. Hartshorne, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Yasutada Sudo, Miki Uruwashi, Miseon Lee, and Jesse Snedeker Cognition. 268–2888. 2016.
2015
  1. Unsupervised Lexicon Discovery from Acoustic Input Chia-Ying Lee, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and James R. Glass Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 389–403. 2015.
  2. Unsupervised Lexicon Discovery from Acoustic Input Chia-Ying Lee, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and James R. Glass Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 389–403. 2015.
  3. A model of rapid phonotactic generalization. Tal Linzen, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015). 2015.
  4. A model of rapid phonotactic generalization. Tal Linzen, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2015). 2015.
  5. Productivity and Reuse in Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage Timothy J. O’Donnell The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. 2015.
  6. Productivity and Reuse in Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage Timothy J. O’Donnell The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2015.
  7. Evaluating Models of Computation and Storage in Human Sentence Processing Luong Min-Thang, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Noah D. Goodman In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning. 2015.
  8. Evaluating models of computation and storage in human sentence processing Luong Min-Thang, Timothy J. O’Donnell, and Noah D. Goodman In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning. 2015. [link]
2013
  1. Arguments and Modifiers from the Learner’s Perspective Leon Bergen, Edward Gibson, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 115-119. Sofia, Bulgaria. 2013.
  2. Arguments and Modifiers from the Learner’s Perspective Leon Bergen, Edward Gibson, and Timothy J. O’Donnell In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 115-119. Sofia, Bulgaria. 2013.
  3. Learning Non-concatenative morphology Michelle Fullwood, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Sofia, Bulgaria. 2013.
  4. Learning Non-concatenative morphology Michelle Fullwood, and Timothy J. O’Donnell Sofia, Bulgaria. 2013.
2011
  1. Productivity and Reuse in Language Timothy J. O’Donnell, Jesse Snedeker, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Noah D. Goodman In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA. 2011.
  2. Productivity and Reuse in Language Timothy J. O’Donnell, Jesse Snedeker, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Noah D. Goodman In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA. 2011.
  3. Storage and computation in syntax: Evidence from relative clause priming. Melissa Troyer, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Evelina Fedorinko, and Edward Gibson In roceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 336–341. Boston, Massachusetts. 2011.
  4. Storage and computation in syntax: Evidence from relative clause priming. Melissa Troyer, Timothy J. O’Donnell, Evelina Fedorinko, and Edward Gibson In roceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 336–341. Boston, Massachusetts. 2011.