Sara Møller Østergaard

Sara Møller Østergaard

About me

I’m a PhD candidate at the department of Cognitive Science and AI at Tilburg University with Bruno Nicenboim and Afra Alishahi as my supervisors. I am working on the development of computational models of reading and sentence processing. The project relies on methods and ideas from psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and Bayesian modeling.

GitHub | Linkedin


Interests

Computational Psycholinguistics

  • Utilizing computational methods and, in particular, language models (LMs) for modeling reading and sentence processing. I have used LM embeddings for modeling effects of semantic association in reading times and ERPs (N400) [[Paper]] [GitHub repo].
  • I have collected and published the Tilburg corpus of Natural Dutch Texts (TiNT). The corpus consists of joint recordings of EEG and self-paced reading times from 71 participants reading natural Dutch texts. The corpus is available through [DataverseNL] [Paper].

Bayesian (Cognitive) Modeling

  • Bayesian modeling of complex behavior using Stan or brms. For my Master’s thesis in Cognitive Science, I did a project on computational models of interpersonal categorization using a Bayesian workflow [GitHub repo].
  • Data analysis using Bayesian modeling techniques. I have been a TA for the course Bayesian Computational Modelling at Aarhus University and Bayesian Multilevel Models at Tilburg University.

Natural Language Processing

  • Projects using methods from Natural Language Processing to detect signals in large text corpora. The emoDynamics project aimed to detect dynamics in emotion expresion in tweets [paper] [GitHub repo]. Additionally, I have worked on developing tools for automatic discovery of emerging (conspirational) narratives.