google: we have invented agi but have hidden it in such an obscure website no one will ever find it anthropic: through our interpretability research, we discovered claude imagines himself wearing a bow tie at all times openai: we added slot machines

A fascinating recent development is that the ML research community -- as the earliest adopters of "AI for research" -- are at the frontlines of dealing with all the problems that come with that (ie. reduced trust in results & reviewers, increased submission load etc). Every other field is next! 😭

Look what Santa has slipped unter my virtual Christmas tree🎄🤩

Very happy to announce that my alma mater Bielefeld University (Germany) now offers an international linguistics master's program, 100% taught in English! Here's a link with more information: linguistlist.org/issues/36/38...

1/ 🌍 How does mixing data from hundreds of languages affect LLM training? In our new paper "Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining" we revisit core assumptions about multilinguality using 1.1B-3B models trained on up to 400 languages. 🧵👇

All research is exploratory if you’re confused enough

🏹 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

Introducing Bolmo, a new family of byte-level language models built by "byteifying" our open Olmo 3—and to our knowledge, the first fully open byte-level LM to match or surpass SOTA subword models across a wide range of tasks. 🧵

And they want to take TikTok away from kids.

🧑‍🔬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!

A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n

New Cambridge Element, Creative Construction Grammar, by Thomas Hoffmann and Mark Turner, out now! Read Open Access at https://cup.org/4pkd1np #languageandlinguistics #LangSky

Finally out & open access: Hoffmann & Turner on Creative Construction Grammar. How do we communicate complex meanings? How do we combine words into sentences? #creativity #language #linguistics #Construction Grammar Find out at www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Check out this exiting issue with papers from various flavors of Construction Grammar describing English constructions! www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

Transformers v5 Release Candidate "This is the first major release in five years where 800 commits have been pushed to main since the latest minor release. This release introduces several refactors that significantly simplify our APIs and internals, and comes with a large number of bug fixes."

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a fantastic friend and researcher, @mdhk.net , who came to visit us in Groningen for a couple of days from Amsterdam! 🎉

We are hiring a doctoral candidate to work in our project that will create a diachronic corpus of Northern Mansi. It is a 65% position (E13 TV-L) for 2 years 9 months starting in spring 2026. Please spread the word! www.finnougristik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/fo...

I’m excited to present SimpleStories at EurIPS! Also if anyone at #EurIPS is interested in chatting about LLM data efficiency, interpretability, model inconsistency or other topics feel free to DM me. Dataset and models: lnkd.in/e_VGWqhP Code: lnkd.in/eEidmv74 Paper: lnkd.in/eH6jS9uY

Postdoc position in Stuttgart, Germany (TV-L 13, 100%) for 18 months, on authority presuppositions in AI systems with Dr. Agnieszka Faleńska and me. For more information and application info, see here: safety.https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/documents/team/falensaa/aphic_postoc.pdf

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

We are advertising **11 new PhD positions** in the second cohort of our RTG on Curiosity (details on all 11 positions here: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/open+posi...). One of these positions is in my group looking at the role of curiosity in early word learning (www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.ht...)

🚀 Introducing TMLR Beyond PDF! 🎬 This is a new, HTML-based submission format for TMLR, that supports interactive figures and videos, along with the usual LaTeX and images. 🎉 Thanks to TMLR Editors in Chief: Hugo Larochelle, @gautamkamath.com, Naila Murray, Nihar B. Shah, and Laurent Charlin!

We began day 2 of our Large Language Models (LLM) for linguistics research workshop @UniKoeln with a fascinating keynote by Charlotte Pouw on "Interpreting models for speech generation and understanding using methods from #psycholinguistics". Charlotte shared […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Tomorrow, we will show within the science festival #geniale how AI voice modification can help explaining the subtle differences between voice qualities, expressing personality, age, mood, gender, health, and much more! #trr318, #bielefeld #tts #xAI wissenswerkstadt.de/veranstaltun...

Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp

📢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

If a language model could dynamically optimise subword tokenisation, how would its subwords evolve during training? In our new paper we study the learning dynamics of subword segmentation: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09197

Am I evil? Am I likeable? Need a 10 minutes break? Like Fantasy? Loath it? Take part in our study and help us by rating images of fictional characters here: bixprag.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/publix/0aSWK...

Coming soon - Turner & Hoffmann on Creative Construction Grammar. In this, we argue that the domain-general process of Conceptual Blending is the cognitive operation that combines constructions. BTW this will be published open access! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

#CfP alert! 🚨 The call for papers and theme sessions for the next International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Bielefeld, 31.08.-02.09.2026) is finally out 🎉 www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/...

Less than 3 weeks to submit an abstract for ICCG14! please pass it on: iccg14.oa-event.com June 4-7, 2026

Our panel moderated by @danaarad.bsky.social "Evaluating Interpretability Methods: Challenges and Future Directions" just started! 🎉 Come to learn more about the MIB benchmark and hear the takes of @michaelwhanna.bsky.social, Michal Golovanevsky, Nicolò Brunello and Mingyang Wang!

#EMNLP2026 will be in Budapest 🇭🇺 24-29/October/2026 (earlier than ever?) #EMNLP2025 #nlp #nlproc

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

One of the great mysteries of #language is how it finds a balance between robust stability and endless flexibility. I believe this requires us to rethink #linguistic structures. In this article, I propose dynamic #tensegrity as a novel architectural metaphor aclanthology.org/2025.cxgsnlp...

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

With only a week left for #EMNLP2025, we are happy to announce all the works we 🐮 will present 🥳 - come and say "hi" to our posters and presentations during the Main and the co-located events (*SEM and workshops) See you in Suzhou ✈️

"The capacity for language exists along a continuum [...]. The idea that language development does not require uniquely human properties becomes increasingly important as legal boundaries expand to include nonhuman species."

🌍Introducing BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data! LLMs learn from vastly more data than humans ever experience. BabyLM challenges this paradigm by focusing on developmentally plausible data We extend this effort to 45 new languages!

Preprint alert! We release BabyBabelLM, a multilingual benchmark of developmentally plausible training data. I was responsible for German and Polish data as well as various child-directed wikis. Immensely rewarding project with exceptionally cool co-authors. 🥳🚀

Keynote at #COLM2025: Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic "Are language models worth it?" Explains that the prior decade of his work on adversarial images, while it taught us a lot, isn't very applied; it's unlikely anyone is actually altering images of cats in scary ways.

i wrote a custom llm sampler for llama-3.1-8b so it could only say words that are in the bible

Huge congrats to the envisionBOX team for the Open Science award nomination! 🎉 My tutorial on speech analysis tools in Python from the Unboxing Multimodality summer school (github.com/mdhk/unboxin...) is now also available at envisionbox.org Thanks for the invitation & this great initiative! 👏

Gentle reminder that the #CfP for #Evolang2026 @evolangconf.bsky.social is still open - deadline October 26! sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/e...

What's the right unit of analysis for understanding LLM internals? We explore in our mech interp survey (a major update from our 2024 ms). We’ve added more recent work and more immediately actionable directions for future work. Now published in Computational Linguistics!

New paper! 🚨 I argue that LLMs represent a synthesis between distributed and symbolic approaches to language, because, when exposed to language, they develop highly symbolic representations and processing mechanisms in addition to distributed ones. arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

Many AI researchers draw inspiration from neuroscience. Naomi Saphra favors a different analogy. Interpretability, in her view, should take a cue from evolutionary biology.

My very first book review is out now 📚 Muchas gracias to @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for inviting me, looking forward to our next project(s) 😇

I'm conducting research on how ACL's peer review policies impact NLP research quality, career trajectories, and inclusivity within our community. I am running a survey, which would take around 7-10 mins to complete: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/j2jr9nH3X0 I would really appreciate insights from y'all!