Amanda Bertsch

I am a PhD student in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Matt Gormley and Graham Neubig. I am a member of NeuLab and an organizer for Queer in AI. I’m fortunate to be funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and to (for the fall) be a part-time student researcher at Meta GenAI.

I work primarily on conditional generation, particularly long-context modeling and inference-time algorithms; my broader research interests include better ways to reason over large quantities of knowledge, model large-scale structure in text, and effectively integrate external knowledge into models. Currently, I’m excited about rethinking positional embeddings, evaluation for realistic long-context settings, and understanding how community divergence affects whose work we engage with. I’m also broadly interested in meta-analysis of the NLP community, including critically examining the benchmarks, datasets, and modeling choices we take as defaults.

I’m trying to get to know my academic neighbors! If we work on similar things (or very different things that might be connected in interesting ways), I’d love to chat– please email me :) I’m also looking for internships for Summer 2025.

Before coming to CMU, I received my bachelors in math and computer science from the University of Arizona, where I was advised by Steven Bethard. Before coming to NLP, I worked in soil microbiology, built large-scale Rube Goldberg machines, and occasionally published short fiction. In my spare time, I write and read speculative fiction, hike, run, and play tabletop games.