Codewords
Guess code words in secret messages sent between spies.
Andrew Wang
The University of Melbourne
I’m a PhD candidate and academic tutor in the Complex Human Data Hub within the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. I do language stuff.
About Me
I work in the area of psychology and cognitive science on a variety of projects related to language. My areas of interest include semantic representation, language models, and bilingualism.
My PhD is supervised by Prof Andrew Perfors, A/Prof Meredith McKague, and Dr Simon De Deyne and concerns core vocaulary in language: what are the most important, most central words in the languages that we speak, in terms of the way we mentally represent the meanings of words, or the way we communicate with each other?
I completed my Honours thesis with A/Prof Meredith McKague on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin language control in bilingual speakers. Some of the other research projects that I am currently working on include the application of a novel framework derived from Australian Aboriginal culture to the study of memory techniques, and an investigation of translation between English and Chinese.
I have extensive experience in teaching at a univeristy level in first, second, third, and Honours year psychology and statistics subjects, and have been involved in the supervision of several Honours students. I have also been involved in producing content that has been used for teaching purposes in university subjects, such as tutorial materials and assessment tasks.
If you are interested in what I do, please get in contact with me below!
Things I Can Do
Play Some Of The Things I've Made
Wikipedia game
Guess the title of a redacted Wikipedia article using as few words as possible.
Publications
- Wang, A., De Deyne, S., McKague, M., & Perfors, A. (2022). Core words in semantic representation. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [url]
- Wang, A., De Deyne, S., McKague, M., & Perfors, A. (2024). Word prediction is more than just predictability: An investigation of core vocabulary. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [url]
- Wang, A., De Deyne, S., McKague, M., & Perfors, A. (2024). Are the most frequent words the most useful? Investigating core vocabulary in reading. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [url]
- Wang, A., De Deyne, S., McKague, M., & Perfors, A. (2025). Communicative efficiency of distributional and semantically-based core vocabularies in narrative text comprehension In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [url]