Franz Nowak

About

I am a first-year PhD student in Natural Language Processing at ETH Zürich, working at rycolab with Ryan Cotterell. I did my undergraduate in Computer Science at Cambridge followed by two years working in the software industry, before returing to ETH for a masters degree and PhD.

In my research I mainly focus on using formal languages and computation theory to explore the capabilities of different LLM architectures.

Other activities

Outside of CS, I like to play Jazz piano. I also enjoy chess and free diving.

Selected Publications

Franz Nowak*, Anej Svete*, Alexandra Butoi, and Ryan Cotterell. 2024. On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Anej Svete*, Franz Nowak*, Anisha Mohamed Sahabdeen, and Ryan Cotterell. 2024. Lower bounds on the expressivity of recurrent neural language models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Franz Nowak, Anej Svete, Li Du, and Ryan Cotterell. 2023. On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Singapore.

Franz Nowak and Ryan Cotterell. 2023. A Fast Algorithm for Computing Prefix Probabilities. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada.