🔈When LLMs solve tasks with a mid-to-low resource input or target language, their output quality is poor. We know that. But can we put our finger on what breaks inside the LLM? We introduce the 💥 translation barrier hypothesis 💥 for failed multilingual generation with LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2506.22724

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!

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

RL boosts LLM reasoning—but why stop at math & code? 🤔 Meet Nemotron-CrossThink—a method to scale RL-based self-learning across law, physics, social science & more. 🔥Resulting in a model that reasons broadly, adapts dynamically, & uses 28% fewer tokens for correct answers! 🧵↓

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

Excited to announce our #NAACL2025 Oral paper! 🎉✨ We carried out the largest systematic study so far to map the links between upstream choices, intrinsic bias, and downstream zero-shot performance across 131 CLIP Vision-language encoders, 26 datasets, and 55 architectures!

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)

🚀 Excited to share a new interp+agents paper: 🐭🐱 MICE for CATs: Model-Internal Confidence Estimation for Calibrating Agents with Tools appearing at #NAACL2025 This was work done @msftresearch.bsky.social last summer with Jason Eisner, Justin Svegliato, Ben Van Durme, Yu Su, and Sam Thomson 1/🧵

When interacting with ChatGPT, have you wondered if they would ever "lie" to you? We found that under pressure, LLMs often choose deception. Our new #NAACL2025 paper, "AI-LIEDAR ," reveals models were truthful less than 50% of the time when faced with utility-truthfulness conflicts! 🤯 1/

1/🚨 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁 🚨 RAG systems excel on academic benchmarks - but are they robust to variations in linguistic style? We find RAG systems are brittle. Small shifts in phrasing trigger cascading errors, driven by the complexity of the RAG pipeline 🧵

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a NEW peptide antibiotic that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria INCLUDING those RESISTANT to existing antibiotics. This discovery marks the first potential new class of antibiotics in NEARLY 30 YEARS. 🧪🧵⬇️

Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University @bucds.bsky.social in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ @najoung.bsky.social @amuuueller.bsky.social. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!

You should read Article 1 of the United States Constitution. It's a trip.

New preprint by @annikatjuka.bsky.social, Robert Forkel, Christoph Rzymski, and myself available, presenting a new version of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). "Advancing the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with New Workflows and Data" arxiv.org/abs/2503.11377

Finally found a way to shorten faculty meetings.

No student anywhere in America has said something as antisemitic as this

The meeting will feature keynote addresses by @mohitbansal.bsky.social, @davidrmortensen.bsky.social, Karen Livescu, and Heng Ji. Plus all of your great talks and posters! nlp.nd.edu/msld25

I’ve been thinking about this reading from Isaiah 58 since I heard it at the Ash Wednesday service today. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

“Again, the mice used for clinical purposes did not undergo gender transition.” www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Today, the House GOP censured me for speaking out for the American people against @POTUS’s plan to cut Medicaid. I accept the consequences of my actions, but I refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. #WeShallOvercome x.com/repalgreen/s...

Reward models for LMs are meant to align outputs with human preferences—but do they accidentally encode dialect biases? 🤔 Excited to share our paper on biases against African American Language in reward models, accepted to #NAACL2025 Findings! 🎉 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12858 (1/10)

I read a paper about search, but I can't quite remember what it's called.

🚨New Breakthrough in Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) Retrieval Research! We address data limitations and offer a fresh evaluation method for these complex queries. Curious how TREC TOT track test queries are created? Check out this thread 🧵 and our paper 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17776

everything is so shitty, read this story about a genuinely good man who saw he had an opportunity to save millions of lives and threw himself into doing so. the world is full of heroes like him.

I humbly put this forward as a possible campaign for the new electric VW

This is Marco Rubio explaining how the USA promised to defend Ukraine forever if they got rid of their nuclear arsenal left after the Soviet Union fell. This is why lil marco was sinking into the couch. He was hoping we wouldn’t find it…so don’t RT right now this very second.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org

What could possibly go wro… oh why do I bother?

wow cool. your findings really remind me of my paper that has a citation count juuust below my h-index

A common observation among students in my Subword Modeling course is that language is unnecessarily complicated. At some level, this is true. Languages are like those complicated table-top games I don't like. 1/3

Dialects lie on continua of (structured) linguistic variation, right? And we can’t collect data for every point on the continuum...🤔 📢 Check out DialUp, a technique to make your MT model robust to the dialect continua of its training languages, including unseen dialects. arxiv.org/abs/2501.16581

What if AI agents did software engineering like humans—seeing the screen & using any developer tool? Introducing Programming with Pixels: an SWE environment where agents control VSCode via screen perception, typing & clicking to tackle diverse tasks. programmingwithpixels.com 🧵

Did you know? Gestures used to express universal concepts—like wishing for luck—vary DRAMATICALLY across cultures? 🤞means luck in US but deeply offensive in Vietnam 🚨 📣 We introduce MC-SIGNS, a test bed to evaluate how LLMs/VLMs/T2I handle such nonverbal behavior! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17710

oh cool I’ve been meaning to learn anxiety

Just going to leave this here should it become useful to anyone…

There are a bunch of published papers referencing “vegetative electron microscopy” because of Generative AI retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/v...

Archive Request xkcd.com/3052

I feel like Catch 22 is one of the most obviously leftist books just bc the protagonist is a smart guy who understands the insanity around him in perfect clarity, but nobody takes him seriously because it's also turned him into a miserable, high-strung neurotic And what's more leftist than that

"But now faith, hope, and love remain--these three. The greatest of these is love." 1 Corinthians 13:13 (WEB) World English Bible

But have you cited it?

Folks we are going to see a lot of poems today that don't scan. Stay safe out there

remember friday? that was ten years ago

Why is it okay for neurotypical people to watch football matches every weekend but if an autistic person wants to watch planes every weekend this is pathologised?

Word of the Day is ‘quockerwodger’ (19th century): a puppet individual whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else.