bigram of the year: "surprisal brainrot"

We captured so many great moments from Language Science Day, thanks to Andrea Zukowski! We wish we could share them all here, but you can see the full gallery on our Flickr page. Click here to check them out: flickr.com/photos/umd-l...

If any friends are at Cog Sci, I’ll be in SF tomorrow! Let me know if you’d like to meet!

The sycophantic tone of ChatGPT always sounded familiar, and then I recognized where I'd heard it before: author response letters to reviewer comments. "You're exactly right, that's a great point!" "Thank you so much for this insight!" Also how it always agrees even when it contradicts itself.

When it comes to text prediction, where does one LM outperform another? If you've ever worked on LM evals, you know this question is a lot more complex than it seems. In our new #acl2025 paper, we developed a method to find fine-grained differences between LMs: 🧵1/9

NEW paper! 💭🖥️ “Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?” — Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡 osf.io/preprints/ps...

A bit late but since I really like this paper, a bit of self-advertising! I am presenting at CMCL today work showing that metrics measuring how a Minimalist Grammar parser modulates memory usage can help us model Self-paced reading data for SRC/ORC contrasts: aclanthology.org/2025.cmcl-1.5/

New preprint on controlled generation from LMs! I'll be presenting at NENLP tomorrow 12:50-2:00pm Longer thread coming soon :)

another day another minicons update (potentially a significant one for psycholinguists?) "Word" scoring is now a thing! You just have to supply your own splitting function! pip install -U minicons for merriment

I’ll also be presenting a talk based on this work Friday afternoon at HSP. Very excited to share it with a psycholinguistics-focused audience!

I’ll be at #HSP2025! I’m presenting a poster in session 4 on how semantic factors might affect timing data from a speeded cloze task (w @virmalised.us, Philip Resnik, and @colinphillips.bsky.social) hsp2025.github.io/abstracts/19...

I’ll be presenting a poster at HSP 2025 in about a week. It’s on memory for pronominal clitic placement in Spanish, come stop by and say hi if you can!

🎬🎥🍿 Video of my keynote at MathPsych2024 now available online www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrwN... #CogSci #CriticalAI #AIhype #AGI #PsychSci #PhilSci 🧪

What do YOU mean by "intelligence", and does ChatGPT fit your definition? We collected the major criteria used in CogSci and other fields, and designed a survey to find out! Access link: www.survey-xact.dk/collect Code: 4S7V-SN4M-S536 Time: 5-10 mins

starter pack for the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing group at the University of Maryland - get all your NLP and data science here! go.bsky.app/V9qWjEi

@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!

"Hey everyone! 👋 I’ve created a starter pack of South Asian artists, authors, academics, activists, and orgs. I’ll keep it updated—DM me or reply if you or someone you know should be added! ✨" go.bsky.app/GGd6dxU

I’ll be presenting two posters on (psycho)linguistically motivated perspectives on LM generalization at #EMNLP2024! 1. Sensitivity to Argument Roles - Session 2 & #BlackBoxNLP 2. Learning & Filler-Gap Dependencies - #CoNLL Excited to chat with other folks interested in compling x cogsci! papers⬇️

5-gram of the day: "language models from computational linguistics"

Today I learned that I may not have a successful psycholinguistics career because I got a B in databases.

Panicked after seeing AGI on my tax form

This sums it up perfectly. It’s not a conversation.

yelled about lexicalism in my NLU seminar do i get a prize

LLMs are so weird because one side is people with five PhDs who have been studying neuron activations for the past three decades and on the other side is someone called leetm5n with an anime avatar just casually releasing increasingly better performing fine tunes of mistral

We’re excited about our first paper looking at speech encoding in single neurons across the depth of human cortex. Out today in @nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... [1/6]

Honored my paper was accepted to Findings of #EMNLP2023! Many psycholinguistics studies use LLMs to estimate the probability of words in context. But LLMs process statistically derived subword tokens, while human processing doesn't. Does this matter? (w/Philip Resnik) 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2310.17774

It's great to see the SPARK Society growing on this platform. Many are interested in supporting the principles upheld by SPARK but are not members. Consider membership. Membership is for ALL SCIENTISTS who are allied in supporting scholars from diverse backgrounds in Cognitive Psychology.

How do adults understand children’s early, highly variable speech? Our new paper in Nature Human Behavior (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) provides evidence that adults’ interpretations depend quite strongly on language expectations—what they think children are likely to say. 1/

To researchers doing LLM evaluation: prompting is *not a substitute* for direct probability measurements. Check out the camera-ready version of our work, to appear at EMNLP 2023! (w/ @rplevy.bsky.social) Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.13264 Original thread: twitter.com/_jennhu/stat...

Do check out these fun posters from our University of Maryland Linguistics “delegation” to SNL! :) #SNL2023 linguistics.umd.edu/news/marylan...

This form was created to facilitate the sharing of invitation codes for "Global South" scholars who may not have the same network privileges as scholars in the "Global North". Scholars who are geographically located in the "Global South" will be given priority. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

this grant writing process has made me realize i focus on questions that ask "to what extent" way too much

This might be flying under the radar (so please RT!), but the US Copyright Office is soliciting comments for its decisions on training ML/NLP/AI systems on copyrighted material (even *non*-generative AI). They need to hear from researchers, so please comment! Deadline Oct 30. www.copyright.gov/ai/

Yi Ting Huang and I have an opening for a postdoctoral researcher on an NSF-funded project, "Syntactic processing across socioeconomic status: Linking input to comprehension". Apply by Nov 15; start Jul 1, 2024 with flexibility. Please disseminate widely! ejobs.umd.edu/postings/114...

i realized that my GRFP proposal is baaaasically my idea of what my dissertation will look like??? we're not ready for this

Mouse tracking for reading? 🤔 "We show that MoTR data correlate well with previously-collected eye tracking data" psyarxiv.com/4ryvs

Nice try but I won't believe that crows are doing statistics until they start writing blog posts about how their junior colleagues' work doesn't replicate. arstechnica.com/science/2023...

A pattern I have noticed is that even tho I have worked in baby, decision-making, cog/neuro/psych labs and even a year out of academia, my interdisciplinary expertise is subtractive. Men's is multiplicative. I'm not even seen as a "real AI" person, even tho I work in an AI dept.

thinking you can replace your writers because you have AI is like thinking you don’t need an engineering department because you have calculators

congrats to @clairebergey.bsky.social on the excellent work!! “Overall, people are able to use contrastive inferences from description to resolve reference and make inferences about a novel object’s category, letting them learn more about new things than literal meaning alone allows.”

brb making 16oz of chai instead of using chatgpt

maybe looking at my GRFP ideas from 2 years ago wasn't the best way to start working on it. i guess....we have grown since then...

what if i commit to using non-lexicalist approaches hmmm

obligatory tag dump: 🧪 research #PsychSciSky #socialpsyc #CogPsyc #AcademicSky #linguistics 🧠💬 🗣💬

every time i think of an agreement attraction study, i would like to have a little voice in my head that just says "don't".

Petition to replace "bias" with "harm," "injustice," "oppression," or other appropriate terms that reflect the depth of these problems in algorithmic systems.

We love going from a 40 minute to a hour and a half commute :)

I agree with this STRONGLY as a person whose gender is “mind your own business” but it’s an easy fix: phrase it as “please share pronouns people can use for you in this context” or some other language that frames this as a question about etiquette rather than identity

i'm teaching next semester and am really worried about seeming passive aggressive if i send students emails with ":)" in the text. zillenial things.