About Yiqian

I am a second-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Harvard, specializing in semantics and pragmatics in natural languages, while also intrigued by how meaning is structured in other natural or artificial communicative systems, and the consequences of different types of meaning structures.

I think of natural languages as an interface between human cognition and communication, and am interested in how they are shaped by both ends. I think of formal languages (e.g., logics, programming languages) as precise reasoning and computational devices, and am interested in generalized notions of expressivity that enable comparisons of different natural languages and formal languages at different levels.

Two questions stemming from the above thread are on top of my head: why natural languages organize meaning into inferences with different properties, and how formal frameworks from logic and epistemology can make AI reasoning more reliable.

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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