Ellie Pavlick

Ellie Pavlick is the Briger Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She also serves as Associate Chair of the Computer Science Department and holds a visiting faculty position at Google AI. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly computational models of semantics and pragmatics that emulate human inference mechanisms. She leads the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab, which explores how language works in humans and machines, emphasizing conceptual reasoning, learning, and generalization.

Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD in Computer and Information Science) and Johns Hopkins University (BA in Economics and Music from Peabody Conservatory), Pavlick teaches courses on computational linguistics, data science, and computational semantics. Her work bridges computer science with cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy, aiming to understand both human and AI language capabilities through comparative analysis.

Her research has produced influential datasets like PPDB 2.0 and SimplePPDB, and she actively publishes on topics including transformer models, multilingual systems, and model evaluation. Despite no listed scientific awards, her contributions to NLP and interdisciplinary collaboration are widely recognized in academic circles.