$ whoami _
I am a second-year PhD student in the UT Austin Computational Linguistics Group. I am fortunate to be advised by Kyle Mahowald. I work on interpretability, with a focus on what the study of language model internals can tell us more broadly about language and cognition.
Previously, I graduated from Cornell University Summa Cum Laude, with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Computational Cognitive Science (the latter through the College Scholar Program). During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate enough to work with Dr. Morten H. Christiansen and Dr. Eugene Vinitsky utilizing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to study idiolects in human language. I have also spent time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories working on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
education
2024 - 2029 PhD Computational Linguistics UT Austin
Minor: Computer Science
2020 - 2024 BA Computer Science Cornell University
BA Mathematics
BA Computational Cognitive Science
(Summa Cum Laude)
selected papers
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🏆 Sasha Boguraev, Christopher Potts, Kyle Mahowald. Causal Interventions Reveal Shared Structure Across English Filler–Gap Constructions EMNLP 2025 Outstanding Paper Award, Oral Spotlight.
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Sasha Boguraev, Kyle Mahowald. Causal Drawbridges: Characterizing Gradient Blocking of Syntactic Islands in Transformer LMs Preprint. Under Review
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Sasha Boguraev, Qing Yao, Kyle Mahowald. France or Spain or Germany or France: A Neural Account of Non-Redundant Redundant Disjunctions CogSci 2026.
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Sasha Boguraev, Katrin Erk, Kyle Mahowald, James Shearer, Steve Wechsler. Reinforcement learning produces efficient case-marking systems CogSci 2025.
news
in the media
I was named one of the Cornell Arts and Sciences Extraordinary Seniors, and had a brief profile written on my time at Cornell.