I am PhD student in the
Institute of Machine Learning at
ETH Zürich. I am a member of
Rycolab, and I am co-advised by
Ryan Cotterell (ETH Zürich) and
David Chiang (
University of Notre Dame). Prior to my PhD, I obtained a bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from
The University of Sheffield, UK, and a master's degree in Data Science from ETH Zürich. I did a research internship in NLP at
IBM Research in Zürich during my master's degree.
Here is a more or less updated resume.
My current research mostly focuses on understanding the capabilities of neural language models using formal language theory. In particular, I'm interested in understanding their expressivity, learnability and succinctness. Recently, I've also been working on language generation in the limit.
Publications
Generating in the Limit with Infinitely Many Hallucinations
Irene Strauss, Alexandra Butoi, Ryan Cotterell
In The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2026
Understanding the Parameter Space Volume of Transformers Encoding Boolean Functions
Blanka Kövér, Alexandra Butoi, Anej Svete, Michael Hahn, Ryan Cotterell
In Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2026
Training Neural Networks as Recognizers of Formal Languages
Alexandra Butoi, Ghazal Khalighinejad, Anej Svete, Josef Valvoda, Ryan Cotterell, and Brian DuSell
In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, Singapore, April 2025
On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Franz Nowak, Anej Svete, Alexandra Butoi, and Ryan Cotterell
In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Bangkok, Thailand, August 2024
Efficient Algorithms for Recognizing Weighted Tree-Adjoining Languages
Alexandra Butoi, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell, and David Chiang
In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Singapore, December 2023
Convergence and Diversity in the Control Hierarchy
Alexandra Butoi, Ryan Cotterell, and David Chiang
In Proceedings of the 61nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, July 2023
Algorithms for Weighted Pushdown Automata
Alexandra Butoi, Brian DuSell, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell, and David Chiang
In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, December 2022
Teaching
I gave a few courses on the theory of neural language models at conferences and summer schools:
Additionally, I've been a teaching assistant for the following courses at ETH Zürich:
252-3005-00L Natural Language Processing, ETH Zürich
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2021, Autumn 2022, 2023, 2024
