Hadas Raviv

Studying Language, Learning, and Intelligence

I am a Research Scholar and CV Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, working with Prof. Uri Hasson. I am broadly interested in human intelligence, particularly how language is acquired through experience and represented in the human mind.

Language has been the common thread throughout my research, from information retrieval and NLP to my current work on language learning. I am fascinated by language because it allows us not only to represent the world but also to shape and change it. While our experience is continuous and multidimensional, language allows us to discretize it, direct attention toward particular aspects, generate new thoughts by combining representations, and communicate them to others.

Large language models have demonstrated that sophisticated language abilities can emerge from learning at scale, yet the conditions under which they learn differ dramatically from those of children. This advances offer a new opportunity to investigate human learning using AI. My research combines cognitively motivated training protocols with ultra-dense, real-world data and evaluations that reflect realistic developmental timescales. I currently focus on early lexical and syntactic learning, particularly how children acquire language through everyday speech.