“All bears have a property”, “Some bears have a property”, “Bears have a property” are different in terms of how the property is generalized to a specific bear – a great example of how language constrains thought! This holds for kids, adults, and according to our new work, (V)LMs! 🧵

happy to have finally made a pilgrimage to ucsd, a special place for some of us :)

My lab at BU is recruiting PhD students and possibly a postdoc this year! We study humans & machines, centered around topics like meaning, generalization, evaluation methods and design, and the nature of computation and representation that underlie language and cognition. 🫴🫴

Here are the slides: docs.google.com/presentation... For context the intended audience is Lang Dev researchers who are attending a session on "what can LLMs tell us about human language". If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!

for something to be considered creative, it has to be semantically/pragmatically felicitous!!!

honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

👾 Full-time research assistant position (1 year) with @sebschu.bsky.social and me! 👾 We're looking for someone to join the research agent evaluation team, starting Fall 2025. Application link to be available soon, but feel free to send us your CV and/or come talk to us at #ACL2025. 🧵

I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip. TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu. sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...

ever since VLMs were a thing i've been interested in how the additional visual modality changes language in meaningful ways. after negative findings after negative findings, excited to report this result! proud of our junior authors for digging into this 🐸

green carded finally 💚💚

Seeing an experiment and thinking "but have they tried X? what if we do Y?" is a key part of research and a start to new discoveries. RExBench tests if coding agents can implement new extensions. It complements recent evals (eg PaperBench from OpenAI ) on replication! See 👇 for details

🚨 Registration is live! 🚨 The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University! A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖 🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/ 📝 Register: forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUH...

i'll be in copenhagen for a few days, lmk if you want to get coffee! will be around most of Thurs and early Sat. alternatively you can also come see me give a talk (at a museum apparently) on Fri: cphnlp.github.io

📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th! - Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo) - Exciting posters by other participants Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1

Very sorry to learn of the passing of LouAnn Gerken, who had such an impact on our understanding of the acquisition of speech sounds and sound patterns obits.mlive.com/us/obituarie...

hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions

in liminal state, as correctly described by a colleague

so very excited that naomi is joining!!! a huge win for cds 💖

"Gaming Linguists" good bigram

Repost appreciated! 🙏 ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency review period is between 3/18-26, and these reviewers will be excluded from the ARR cycle. If you're interested, please sign up here! docs.google.com/forms/d/1fH7...

have many tasks but immobilized by car

Lots of folks talking about scaling LLM inference over this last year Internally, I’ve been developing and using a library that makes this extremely easy, and I decided to open-source it Meet the decoding library: github.com/benlipkin/de... 1/7

this is a first... suffering maximized...

why say "bad" when you can say "ungood"

at the point of the semester where emergency todo lists inside of a todo list is made

so proud of Hayley Ross for getting a best paper award at GenBench this year!! 🎉🪅🎉 I'm sure Kate would be too :) check out our paper and share if you think homemade cats are cats! arxiv.org/abs/2410.17482

First bsky post about tinlab at #EMNLP2024! A few highlights: * Presentations from Aditya Yedetore and Hayley Ross on neural network generalizations! * I'm giving a keynote at GenBench & organizing BlackboxNLP * Ask me about our faculty hiring & PhD/postdoc positions at Boston University!

First bsky post about tinlab at #EMNLP2024! A few highlights: * Presentations from Aditya Yedetore and Hayley Ross on neural network generalizations! * I'm giving a keynote at GenBench & organizing BlackboxNLP * Ask me about our faculty hiring & PhD/postdoc positions at Boston University!