Since April 1, @weissweiler.bsky.social assumes the position of Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at @unileipzig.bsky.social and will contribute her expertise to @scadsai.bsky.social as PI in the field of computational linguistics. 👉 scads.ai/research-on-...

Meet @weissweiler.bsky.social, Postdoc at Uppsala Uni 🇸🇪 and ELLIS Member, working on #NLProc, computational linguistics & LM interpretability. She’s accepted an Assistant Prof position at Leipzig Uni 🇩🇪—the first female CompSci professor there—and is eager to support more women 👏 #WomenInELLIS

🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP

🏹 Job alert: Two fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing at University of Leipzig 📍 Leipzig 🇩🇪 📅 Apply by Jan 15th 🔗 https://ellis.eu/research/jobs/2025-12-16-two-fully-funded-phd-positions-in-natural-language-processing

@weissweiler.bsky.social is setting up her own group at @unileipzig.bsky.social and @scadsai.bsky.social as Assistant Professor for #NaturalLanguageProcessing and is advertising two open PhD positions. 🥳 👉 Full announcement: leonieweissweiler.github.io/phd_leipzig....

🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP

🥳Life Update! I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be starting as assistant professor for Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social in April! I’m deeply grateful to everyone who supported me on this journey. I will be recruiting PhD students with @scadsai.bsky.social, stay tuned for details!

📢Out now in NEJLT!📢 In each of these sentences, a verb that doesn't usually encode motion is being used to convey that an object is moving to a destination. Given that these usages are rare, complex, and creative, we ask: Do LLMs understand what's going on in them? 🧵1/7

Oh cool! Excited this LM + construction paper was SAC-Highlighted! Check it out to see how LM-derived measures of statistical affinity separate out constructions with similar words like "I was so happy I saw you" vs "It was so big it fell over".

I can confirm that I was indeed the 2nd author!

There's many directions where this could go, multilingual, low-resource language, interpretability, depending on your profile, and the internship may lead to a PhD, provided we get funding!

As we found in aclanthology.org/2025.coling-... that BPE-based LLMs (i.e. pretty much all LLMs) did not handle prefixations well

Basically the idea is to extend www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... to see how well LLMs model competition between affixes, not only suffixes (e.g. -ity vs. -ness) but also prefixes (e.g. un- vs. non-)

Come work with @yvofr.bsky.social @weissweiler.bsky.social and me at @mlia-isir.bsky.social for a M2 internship on Assessing the Morphological Competence of LLMs! For 5-6 months from February or March 2026. Paid 600€/month

I'm in Suzhou to present our work on MultiBLiMP, Friday @ 11:45 in the Multilinguality session (A301)! Come check it out if your interested in multilingual linguistic evaluation of LLMs (there will be parse trees on the slides! There's still use for syntactic structure!) arxiv.org/abs/2504.02768

📢Come join us in Uppsala to work on multilingual NLP as an independent postdoc with the most wonderful colleagues! The deadline is Nov 26th, the expected start date is Feb 1st. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to hear more about this department and I will continue gushing about it.

Session 5: "BabyLM’s First Constructions." In a companion paper to the first one, we show that much of this constructional knowledge is even present in "babyLMs" with more developmentally plausible amounts of training: arxiv.org/abs/2506.02147. w/ @weissweiler.bsky.social

Session 4: "Constructions are Revealed in Word Distributions." We show that rich knowledge of syntactic constructions in masked language models (MLMs) is revealed by patterns of contextual constraint. arxiv.org/abs/2503.06048. w/ @weissweiler.bsky.social + @kmahowald.bsky.social

If you're going to #EMNLP, Josh Rozner will be representing CLiMB Lab with 2 talks, sessions 4+5, both in A108, check them out!

Happening now! Poster 42!

Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁 Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit: 1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

📢Life update📢 🥳I'm excited to share that I've started as a postdoc at Uppsala University NLP @uppsalanlp.bsky.social, working with Joakim Nivre on topics related to constructions and multilinguality! 🙏Many thanks to the Walter Benjamin Programme of the DFG for making this possible.

Happening now at the SIGTYP poster session! Come talk to Leonie and me about MultiBLiMP!

Hi #NLP community, I'm urgently looking for an emergency reviewer for the ARR Linguistic Theories track. The paper investigates and measures orthography across many languages. Please shoot me a quick email if you can review!

I'm looking for a reviewer for a paper on measuring syntactic productivity (lots of maths!) due a week from now. Please shoot me an email if you could review!

Do LLMs learn language via rules or analogies? This could be a surprise to many – models rely heavily on stored examples and draw analogies when dealing with unfamiliar words, much as humans do. Check out this new study led by @valentinhofmann.bsky.social to learn how they made the discovery 💡

Thrilled to share that this is out in @pnas.org today! 🎉 We show that linguistic generalization in language models can be due to underlying analogical mechanisms. Shoutout to my amazing co-authors @weissweiler.bsky.social, @davidrmortensen.bsky.social, Hinrich Schütze, and Janet Pierrehumbert!

Can self-supervised models 🤖 understand allophony 🗣? Excited to share my new #NAACL2025 paper: Leveraging Allophony in Self-Supervised Speech Models for Atypical Pronunciation Assessment arxiv.org/abs/2502.07029 (1/n)

On my way to #NAACL2025 where I'll give a keynote at the noisy text workshop (WNUT), presenting some of the challenges & methods for dialect NLP + also discussing dialect speakers' perspectives! 🗨️ Beyond “noisy” text: How (and why) to process dialect data 🗓️ Saturday, May 3, 9:30–10:30

🌍📣🥳 I could not be more excited for this to be out! With a fully automated pipeline based on Universal Dependencies, 43 non-Indoeuropean languages, and the best LLMs only scoring 90.2%, I hope this will be a challenging and interesting benchmark for multilingual NLP. Go test your language models!

We can use small LMs to test hypotheses about the language network and how everything is connected! Here, we find that dative alternation preferences are learned from dative-specific input statistics *and* from more general short-first preferences. Great work by @qyao.bsky.social, go follow him!

Models have preferences like giving inanimate 📦 stuff to animate 👳 Is it that they just saw a lot of such examples in pretraining or is it generalization and deeper understanding? alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.20850

✨New paper ✨ RoBERTa knows the difference between "so happy that you're here", "so certain that I'm right" and "so happy that I cried"! Exciting result (and more) from Josh Rozner along with @coryshain.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social and myself, go check it out!

New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language? Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)

If you are working as an AC or SAC for ARR and would like to join some kind of *unofficial* Slack channel to ask each other questions and figure out this process together, please comment in this thread or send me a message. #ACL2025

Is it intentional that aclanthology.org/anthology.bi... contains journal papers, e.g. from TACL and CL, but aclanthology.org/anthology.bib does not? Has anyone else noticed this? @aclmeeting.bsky.social

The roots of our publishing craze can be traced to 1970s IBM posters

✨New paper✨ Linguistic evaluations of LLMs often implicitly assume that language is generated by symbolic rules. In a new position paper, @adelegoldberg.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I argue that languages are not Lego sets, and evaluations should reflect this! arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13195

LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

I'll be presenting a position piece (arxiv.org/abs/2409.17005) on what cognitive science and linguistics can bring to the Math + AI field tomorrow from 11:00 -12:30 and 4:00 - 5:00 at the (aptly named) #NeurIPS2024 MathAI Workshop in West Meeting Room 118-120. Come say hi and hear about my work!

LLMs have been tested for their acquisition of rules, but investigating a phenomenon with natural variation shows that what may look like rule learning at first is actually an analogical process! Check out the paper to see how humans and models decide if this is informativeness or informativity! 🤔

CogSci2025 poster has landed, in both “wow the future looks bright for CogSci” mode, and also “our theories will make you think and possibly write poetry mode”. @neilbramley.bsky.social @carenwalker.bsky.social @cogscisociety.bsky.social

@kanishka.bsky.social and I have made a starter pack for researchers working broadly on linguistic interpretability and LLMs! go.bsky.app/F9qzAUn Please message me or comment on this post if you've noticed someone who we forgot or would like to be added yourself!