dicksonb [at] iu [dot] edu
Hi, I’m a PhD student in computer science at Indiana University working with Zoran Tiganj.
I’m interested in:
- attention, memory, long-context modeling, hybrid models, cognitive science
- llm training methodology, architecture, open models, distributed training
- prepretraining, pretraining, postprepreposttraining, mid-training
Previously I did a master’s in computational linguistics at Indiana University with Damir Cavar in the NLP Lab working on time and event reasoning, and knowledge graphs and ontologies, and before that did my bachelor’s at Michigan State University where I studied linguistics, TESOL, Chinese, and Korean, and did a summer language program at Harbin Institute of Technology.
Research:
Gradual Forgetting: Logarithmic Compression for Extending Transformer Context Windows
Billy Dickson, Zoran Tiganj
First Workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS
2025
[paper]
Time-Local Transformer
Billy Dickson, James Mochizuki-Freeman, Md Rysul Kabir, Zoran Tiganj
Computational Brain & Behavior
2025
[paper]
Vision-language models learn the geometry of human perceptual space
Craig Sanders, Billy Dickson, Sahaj Singh Maini, Robert Nosofsky, Zoran Tiganj
Preprint arXiv:2510.20859
2025
[paper]
Comparing Perceptual Judgments in Large Multimodal Models and Humans
Billy Dickson*, Sahaj Singh Maini*, Craig Sanders, Robert Nosofsky, Zoran Tiganj
Behavior Research Methods
2025
[paper]
More Research:
Advancing Adverse Drug Event Detection in Social Media Through Knowledge Graph and GraphRAG LLM Architectures
Andrew Davis, Billy Dickson, Damir Cavar, Danny Valdez, Francis Tyers
American Academy of Health Behavior
2025
[poster]
A Two-Stage NLP System for Extracting and Normalizing Adverse Drug Events from Tweets.
Andrew Davis, Billy Dickson, Sandra Kubler
9th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications Workshop and Shared Tasks, Association for Computational Linguistics
2025
[paper]
Computing Ellipsis Constructions: Comparing Classical NLP and LLM Approaches
Damir Cavar, Zoran Tiganj, Ludovic Vetea Mompelat, Billy Dickson
Society for Computation in Linguistics
2024
[paper]
Event sequencing annotation with TIE-ML
Damir Cavar, Ali Aljubailan, Ludo Vetea Mompelat, Yuna Won, Billy Dickson, Matthew Fort, Andrew Davis, Soyoung Kim
18th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC
2022
[paper]
Temporal Information and Event Markup Language: TIE-ML Markup Process and Schema Version 1.0
Damir Cavar, Billy Dickson, Ali Aljubailan, Soyoung Kim
15th International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing
2021
[paper]
More More Interests:
- formula 1, racket sports, video games, card games, indycar, kalaOK, honda civic eg6, weightlifting, gojo
Teaching:
Fall 2025, Assistant Instructor, Applied Machine Learning (Indiana University)
Summer 2024, Generative AI and Symbolic Knowledge Representations: Large Language Models, Knowledge, and Reasoning (ESSLLI 2024, Leuven, Belgium)
Spring 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Assistant Instructor, Data Mining (Indiana University)
Spring 2020, Adult Communicative Focused English (Michigan State University)
Education:
PhD, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Indiana University, ~2027
MS, Computer Science, Indiana University, 2025
MS, Computational Linguistics, Indiana University, 2022
BA, Linguistics, Michigan State University, 2020