About Me
I am a Product Associate at Echobox in London, where I work with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to research, plan, implement, and analyze new product features and launches from a data-driven perspective.
After graduating from my master's degree in Linguistics at Harvard University, I spent my summer as a Data Science Intern at a FinTech start-up, Spring Oaks Capital, working with unlabelled SMS and call transcript datasets to predict clients' actions on their debt accounts using NLP and ML techniques.
In my graduate school career, I worked at the intersection of computational, historical, and theoretical linguistics. I love to discover new and innovative approaches to language data, and really any data I can find, without letting field-specific methodologies limit my projects and models.
I worked out of the Meaning & Modality Lab at Harvard to conduct my master's thesis
You can access more of my work on my GitHub
Contact me at tessmonks@g.harvard.edu or on LinkedIn
Research
My research areas fall at the intersection of language change, computational linguistics, experimental linguistics, and formal theoretical semantics. My current project examines the grammaticalization cline from distal demonstrative ('that' in English) to complementizer, definite article, copula, and third person pronoun. You can read my master's thesis, entitled "Demonstrative Shift and Proximal Markedness", here.
Presentations
- 2022. Monks, Tess & Kathryn Davidson. "Experimental and Computational Approaches to Mapping Grammaticalization in Demonstratives" at the 96th annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), Washington, DC.
- 2021. "Modelling Diachronic Semantics of Demonstrative Pronouns" at Modelling Constructional Variation and Change - Agents, networks, and vectors, University of Zurich.
- 2021. "Rational Speech Act Framework and Evolutionary Game Theory" at Meaning & Modality Lab meeting, Harvard University. [slides]
- 2021. Monks, Tess & Kathryn Davidson. "Demonstrative Shift and Proximal Markedness" at Formal Diachronic Semantics 6, University of Cologne. [slides] [abstract]
- 2021. "Testing Proximal/Distal Demonstratives and their Grammaticalization Paths" at Southern New England Workshop in Semantics, University of Connecticut. [slides]
- 2021. "Grammaticalization Clines of Demonstratives" Meaning & Modality Lab meeting, Harvard University.