Haoran Zhao

I am a master's student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

Previously, I was an undergraduate student at Drexel University, where I was fortunately advised by Jake Williams. Before Drexel, I spent two amazing years at Lanzhou University in China, where I very much enjoyed the first two years of my college life.

I also spent some amazing time at the Computation & Cognition Lab and Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford, where I worked with Noah Goodman and Tobias Gerstenberg and got to know a lot of amazing people who shaped my current research focus.

I am interested in social language use, communication, and AI (social cognition broadly). I view language primarily as a communication tool. Some of the questions I am currently thinking of -- How do humans interpret and produce language in social contexts (Pragmatics)? How does language interplay with humans' various social cognitive tasks (for example, how does language help us reason)? I study these problems through both computational and behavioral methods. I am currently exploring these questions with Max Kleiman-Weiner and Robert Hawkins.

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News

• August 2025: Attending Brains, Minds, and Machines summer course @ Woods Hole, MA !
• July 2025: Attending my first CogSci at San Francisco!
• July 2025: Ran my first ever Full Marathon at San Francisco!
• May 2025: Got accepted to COSMOS summer school in Tokyo this September!
• April 2025: Two paper got accepted to CogSci 2025!
• April 2025: Got accepted to the MIT CBMM summer school this August!

Research