Ankana Saha
Iβm a final year PhD candidate in Linguistics at Harvard University and an affiliate at the Meaning & Modality Lab and The Institute for Quantitative Social Science. My research lies at the intersection of semantics, pragmatics, and syntax, investigating how utterances acquire meaning, how that meaning interacts with linguistic structure and discourse context, and how these processes can be modeled in both human and artificial systems. You can find out more about my research here.
ποΈ Recent News
π€ Invited talk β Discourse Reasoning in Humans and Artificial Language Systems at the University of Pennsylvania, November 19, 2025.
π€ Invited talk β From Humans to Language Models: Testing the Boundaries of Pragmatic Understanding at the Harvard Language & Cognition Seminar, November 11, 2025.
π€ Invited talk β Bridging Modalities: Tracking Reference in Discourse Across Spoken and Sign Language at the Linguistic Meaning Lab, Cornell University, October 10, 2025.
π New paper β The or That? Evaluating Language Modelsβ Sensitivity to Discourse Structure in Anaphora (with Jennifer Hu and Kathryn Davidson) at the Conference on Language Modelling (COLM) 2025 PragLM Workshop. [pdf]
π New paper β Demonstrative Descriptions and Anti-Uniqueness at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29. [pdf]
π New paper β Anaphoric Demonstratives in Mandarin (with YaΔmur SaΔ, Jian Cui, and Kathryn Davidson) at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 34. [pdf]