🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖 What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics? I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061 To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!

New opinion piece on the interface between research on concepts and categories in minds vs. in neural network LMs! I take the position that there is much to be learned from this interface (e.g., learning about concepts from language alone) and outline some directions for future.

Scientific American has a piece today on NACLO (the linguistics competition) by @dodecalemma.bsky.social! Features some quotes and puzzles by yours truly!

What's the endgame for people who mass-email conference organizers saying that they'd like to review papers? I've gotten several such requests in the past few months

I need one too!

I could use an emergency reviewer for an ACL submission involving interpretability and syntax. Please DM me if you might be able to provide an emergency review before February 15!

I like the three consecutive dots in the word "hijinks". They're like an ellipsis telling you that the hijinks will continue.

I'm excited to be speaking at Carnegie Mellon today - it's where I got my start as a researcher (a summer job making a finite-state morphological analyzer for Kinyarwanda), and it's fun to be back! Say hi if you're around! www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/misc-pages/l...

🚨Calling all fans of analyzing neural networks: There will be a workshop at Yale in the spring that you should come to! (May 11 to May 13)

Announcing the first Workshop on Formal Languages and Neural Networks (FLaNN)! We invite the submission of abstracts for posters that discuss the formal expressivity, computational properties, and learning behavior of neural network models, including large language models (LLMs).

These products flagrantly violate the rules of English compounds! "Reese's Oreo" should be a type of Oreo, not a type of Reese's!

Congratulations to all of the new ACL fellows!! I'm delighted to see @lorislevin.bsky.social recognized. She's the person who introduced me to computational linguistics, and my scientific outlook has been deeply shaped by her views on the relationship between linguistics & NLP. 1/n

A fantastic department - highly recommend applying!

Me giving my account number to a customer service rep: "That's 2 as in twenty-three, 7 as in seven hundred six, 1 as in fourteen, 1 as in fourteen, 0 as in...well...uh..."

Still waiting for Google to release Ge (the large version of Gemini)

Come be my colleague! The Yale Dept of Linguistics is hiring a 3-year Lecturer in Historical Linguistics. There's a great group here working on language change, and you could become part of it! Application review begins Dec 14. For more info, see apply.interfolio.com/177395

Do any languages have different forms of "and" for different phrase types? English uses "and" no matter what's being joined: "bread and butter" (nouns), "divide and conquer" (verbs), "short and sweet" (adjs). Are there languages that vary the conjunction across these contexts?

🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026! If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply! PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_... Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...

Who's up for a short thread demonstrating just how wrong this claim is by Mistral's CEO, using research by @rtommccoy.bsky.social (an co-authors) regarding crossword puzzles? Just me? Well whatever, let's dive into a mini-exploration of the Embers of Autoregression and why they singe...

I’m excited to share our Findings of EMNLP paper w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social , @rtommccoy.bsky.social, and @rdhawkins.bsky.social ! Language models, unlike humans, require large amounts of data, which suggests the need for an inductive bias. But what kind of inductive biases do we need?

An exciting postdoc opportunity for researchers in CogSci! The deadline is coming up soon: Nov 10

Come be my colleague! The Wu Tsai Institute at Yale has two faculty searches ongoing: - One in computational cognitive science (due Dec 1) - One in neurodevelopment (rolling) 🧠🤖

Much as "cupboard" is pronounced "cubberd", I think that "clipboard" should be pronounced "clibberd"

Beginning a Grand Tour of California! - Oct 6: Colloquium at Berkeley Linguistics - Oct 9: Workshop at Google Mountain View - Oct 14: Talk at UC Irvine Center for Lg, Intelligence & Computation - Oct 16: NLP / Text-as-Data talk at NYU Say hi if you'll be around!

Exciting talk in the linguistics department at UC Berkeley tomorrow! @rtommccoy.bsky.social

🤖 🧠 NEW BLOG POST 🧠 🤖 What skills do you need to be a successful researcher? The list seems long: collaborating, writing, presenting, reviewing, etc But I argue that many of these skills can be unified under a single overarching ability: theory of mind rtmccoy.com/posts/theory...

"Hello world!" sounds like a word followed by a crossword clue for that word: "Hell = Low world"

A linguistic note about David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead 🧵 [very minor spoilers for both] 1/n

New position paper! We argue that symbolic and neural network models are not in opposition to each other, but occupy different levels of analysis, and also outline a new research agenda for better understanding the relationship between them. Please check out the paper / thread for more details!

🤖 🧠 NEW PAPER ON COGSCI & AI 🧠 🤖 Recent neural networks capture properties long thought to require symbols: compositionality, productivity, rapid learning So what role should symbols play in theories of the mind? For our answer...read on! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 1/n

According to Jane Austen, linguists are extraordinarily cold-hearted. (Though at least we're not as bad as mathematicians!)

So much research is being done about LLMs that it's hard to stay on top of the literature. To help with this, I've made a list of all the most important papers from the past 8 years: rtmccoy.com/pubs/ I hope you enjoy!

July the 4th be with you!

New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell). We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

The word "laundry" contains both steps of the laundry process: 1. Undry 2. Dry

Happy to announce the first workshop on Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models — PragLM @ COLM 2025! 🎉 How do LLMs engage in pragmatic reasoning, and what core pragmatic capacities remain beyond their reach? 🌐 sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/praglm/ 📅 Submit by June 23rd

Had a fun visit to UChicago/TTIC over the past couple days - really great group doing NLP/CompLing there!

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

At MIT for the day to speak at the NLP seminar! Say hi if you're around and need a break from NeurIPS drafting!

I constructed today's NYT crossword! This one has some personal connections, described at the WordPlay article by @samcorbin.bsky.social (contains spoilers): www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/c... I hope you enjoy!

🧩🦾New paper🦾🧩 We use Linguistics Olympiad puzzles to test Large Language Models Check it out if you're at NAACL! It's being presented by Nathan Chi at 4:00 today in the LoResMT workshop aclanthology.org/2025.loresmt...

Made a new assignment for a class on Computational Psycholinguistics: - I trained a Transformer language model on sentences sampled from a PCFG - The students' task: Given the Transformer, try to infer the PCFG (w/ a leaderboard for who got closest) Would recommend! 1/n

The past few years have been a wild time to work in NLP - huge amounts of progress, hype, uncertainty, and excitement. This piece does a fantastic job of documenting what that's been like. I had fun being one of the interviewees! By John Pavlus in @quantamagazine.bsky.social

The initial application deadline is coming up (April 30 - but we will continue to review applications until the position is filled, so it's worth applying even if a little after that). Please share with any computational linguists and/or syntacticians who may be interested!

The Department of Linguistics at Yale University is seeking to hire a one-year lecturer with expertise in Computational Linguistics and/or Syntax for the 2025-2026 school year. See the job ad for more info: linguistlist.org/issues/36/11... Please send to any who might be interested!

I'm excited to be visiting UPenn tomorrow to speak at the ILST Seminar! Come by if you'll be around! web.sas.upenn.edu/lcs/news-eve...

Cognitive scientists who work across levels of analysis should be called Marr's Rovers

🤖🧠New paper!🧠🤖 A common assumption: In neural networks, "inductive bias" = "model architecture" But in fact initial weights also greatly influence inductive bias! This makes it possible for the same bias to be realized in very different architectures - albeit w/ limits arxiv.org/abs/2502.20237

Excited to announce that the (stellar!) program for NASSLLI is out now: nasslli25.shane.st Further details on registration and whatnot to follow in the coming weeks. Please do circulate to anyone you know who may be interested in attending!

The "ash heap of history" is where we store all the æ's that are no longer used in English spelling