About Yiqian

I am a second-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Harvard, specializing in semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces with cognition and reasoning.

I am interested in two connected questions: why natural languages organize meaning into different types of inferences (at-issue entailments, presuppositions, implicatures), and how formal frameworks from logic and epistemology can make AI reasoning more reliable. Both questions stem from a broader curiosity about how meaning is structured in communication and reasoning, and about the expressivity of natural and formal languages that mediate them.

On the first question, I investigate how different types of inferences are represented and why they arise. My current projects focus on presuppositions: how they project across disjunction and why certain types of words trigger them, through a combination of linguistic theory, information theory, human behavioral experiments, and computational modeling.

On the second question, I am interested in how to precisely specify what an AI system should believe, and how to ensure it maintains consistency across its outputs, especially when some beliefs should be treated as more foundational than others. I hope to develop research agents that draw on tools from philosophical logic, particularly belief revision and epistemic logic.

If any of this resonates with you, I would love to hear from you! Whether to exchange ideas, explore collaboration, or just chat, you can reach me at yiqian_wang@g.harvard.edu.

Background: Before Harvard, I completed my undergraduate study at Tsinghua University (2020–2024) in Beijing, where I built a foundation in linguistics, philosophical logic, English literature, mathematics, and cognitive psychology. I am proud to have been part of the Tsinghua Logic community.

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