Research - Tianai Dong

Language has been at the core of my research from the very start. In my current work, I study language as it's used in the real world—how it plays out in everyday life and how it interacts with broader aspects of cognition, including social and physical reasoning. I'm lucky to work with thoughtful, inspiring collaborators who make the work both meaningful and fun. Together, we're always learning something new about language, especially across three main directions:

Language Learning from Interaction

You've got THIS! Demonstratives as a Multimodal Pathway to Early Word Learning
Yayun Zhang*, Dota Tianai Dong*, Satoshi Tsutsui, Carolina Rodríguez Chavarría, Aslı Özyürek, Caroline F. Rowland, Chen Yu, Paula Rubio-Fernandez
In submission
paper

Real-time Embodied Inference in Social Interaction Supports Early Word Learning
Yayun Zhang, Dota Tianai Dong, Melina L. Knabe, Caroline F. Rowland, Chen Yu
In submission

The Statistics of Natural Experience
Dota Tianai Dong*, Jing Li*, Tobias Thomas*, Linda B. Smith
In Proceedings of the Analytical Connectionism Schools 2023--2024, PMLR 320:126-150, 2026
paper

Language and Language Models in Interaction

Do Social Micro-processes Emerge in Multimodal Language Models? A Case Study of Egocentric Referential Communication
Dota Tianai Dong, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Jennifer Hu, Paula Rubio-Fernandez
In prep
Abstract

Using Perspectival Words Is Harder Than Vocabulary Words for Humans —and Even More So for Multimodal Language Models
Dota Tianai Dong*, Yifan Luo*, Po-Ya Angela Wang, Asli Ozyurek, Paula Rubio-Fernandez
To Appear In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Association for Computational Linguistics.
ACL oral presentation (<5% of submissions).
paper

Visually Grounded Follow-up Questions: A Dataset of Spatial Questions Which Require Dialogue History
Dota Tianai Dong, Alberto Testoni, Luciana Benotti, Raffaella Bernardi
In Proceedings of Second International Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics, 2021.
paper

Language Brain with Interaction

A Decade of Comparing Brains to DNNs: Progress and Perspectives
Lea-Maria Schmitt*, Dota Tianai Dong*, Emin Celik*, Floris P. de Lange, Mariya Toneva
Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Accepted).

Vision-Language Integration in Multimodal Video Transformers (Partially) Aligns with the Brain
Dota Tianai Dong, Mariya Toneva
In Proceedings of ICLR 2023 Workshop on Multimodal Representation Learning: Perks and Pitfalls.
paper

Early Interest in Computational Discourse

DiscoGeM: A Crowdsourced Corpus of Genre-Mixed Implicit Discourse Relations
Merel Scholman, Dota Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
paper

Comparison of Methods for Explicit Discourse Connective Identification across Various Domains
Merel Scholman, Dota Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, 2021.
paper

Analyses of Multiple Discourse Relations within a Chinese Sentence
Dota Tianai Dong, Bonnie Webber, Jennifer Spenader
Bachelor Thesis.
paper

* equal contribution (occasionally listed in reverse alphabetical order to support visibility for later surnames).