Announcing a new version of our 2024 paper on linguistic hypothesis generation from LMs! @najoung.bsky.social and I have systematized our hypothesis generation framework, added stringent criteria for model selection, 10x-ed our learning trials, and included an epigraph from Jeff Elman 🙏!

Perhaps more ink has been spilled on the topic of Island Constraints than any other such phenomenon in theoretical linguistics. In new work with @kmahowald, we study how LMs process such phenomenon, using techniques from mechanistic interpretability to guide our exploration. 🧵👇

The Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford (cogtoolslab.github.io) is recruiting two new research staff members to join in AY 26-27. Full-Time Lab Manager: forms.gle/UVwfx5wbY9Km.... IRiSS Predoc Researcher: iriss.stanford.edu/predoc/2026-.... Please share widely in your networks, thank you!!

Some bears will appear in ACL Findings this year! Congrats to Sriram and Siyuan for their hard work -- I am excited about this paper for two main reasons: 1) I got to express a little bit about what I think about language and thought; 2) this was one of the smoothest projects i've worked on!

To appear in ACL 2026 main -- congrats to Tianyang on her first PhD project! Check out our preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 to understand the interplay between representations from language (alone) vs. from extra-linguistic input (for category membership)

Slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

People sometimes say that an outcome was caused by two things. We might say Amy got sick because (a) There was cilantro in the soup *and* (b) Amy is allergic to cilantro Beautiful new theory of causal selection from @tadegquillien.bsky.social that explains why we sometimes select two causes

Met so many people (old friends and new) in person for the first time + it was such an amazing time at both Groningen and UvA!

Excited to visit @gronlp.bsky.social (April 1) and @amsterdamnlp.bsky.social (April 2) to present a talk on something I have been thinking together with @najoung.bsky.social for the past 3 years!

he‘s not wrong… 🤷‍♂️http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu/papers/lupyan_bergen_2015.pdf

Have three posters with my awesome collaborators today at #hsp2026! Read on more and come to the posters to talk about the importance of neutral baselines in priming, the need to model uncertainty in meaning in RSA, and the dissociation of prediction and structural processing in eye-tracking!

New paper with @coryshain.bsky.social: We develop "perturbation" - a simple approach to finding shared representations (common abstractions) in LMs. We perturb an LM by fine-tuning it on a single adversarial example and measure how this perturbation “infects” other examples.

Heading to #EACL2026! 🇲🇦 Friday 11a Poster Session 6: LMs struggle to perform inferences around discourse connectives aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-lo... Sunday 5p TeachingNLP workshop: new course on discourse+generation aclanthology.org/2026.teachin... w/ @kanishka.bsky.social + Daniel Brubaker

Woohoo Grusha is here! Follow her!!!

Excited for #EACL2026 in Morocco! I will be there alongside @jessyjli.bsky.social and Daniel Brubaker (UT undergrad) Daniel will present Wugnectives (arxiv.org/abs/2510.09556) on Friday (11am posters) I will present work with @sangheekim.bsky.social (arxiv.org/abs/2510.12740) the same time! 1/2

A new paper from @yuyan0m.bsky.social on how children acquire the meaning of the word "zero". Tl/dr: It ain't nothing.

⚛️ Introducing CREATE, a benchmark for creative associative reasoning in LLMs. Making novel, meaningful connections is key for scientific & creative works. We objectively measure how well LLMs can do this. 🧵👇

Martin = one of the kindest people I know! Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the best in their field!

I'm hiring a new lab manager for my lab @ UCSD! For more info on the lab, check out our website: lillab.ucsd.edu Target start date is June 1 (flexible) and application deadline is March 26. Please share with anyone you think might be a good fit! Apply here: employment.ucsd.edu/laboratory-c...

📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

What is the interplay between representations learned from (language) surface forms alone, and those learned from more grounded evidence (e.g.,vision)? Excited to share new work understanding “Cross-modal taxonomic generalization” in (V)LMs arxiv.org/abs/2603.07474 1/

@tylerachang.bsky.social and I will be presenting the Goldfish as an oral at #LREC2026 in Mallorca! 🌴

Short post on what I call the "no-magic approach to understanding intelligent systems" — the philosophy I think of as motivating our work on understanding intelligence without resorting to magical thinking about AI or humans! infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/the-no-mag...

🚨New Paper!🚨 How do reasoning LLMs handle inferences that have no deterministic answer? We find that they diverge from humans in some significant ways, and fail to reflect human uncertainty… 🧵(1/10)

Check out our special theme: new missions for NLP research!

I wrote a short article on AI Model Evaluation for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 📕👇 Hope this is helpful for anyone who wants a super broad, beginner-friendly intro to the topic! Thanks @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social for this amazing initiative!

Some days you finish 5 meta-reviews in ~one go, and some days you take 1.5 days to complete one meta-review. Such is the AC life!

I'm looking forward to @jennhu.bsky.social's South by Semantics talk next week at UT Austin! She'll discuss "micro-pragmatics" inferences and world modeling in language models 🤖

Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461

Job update: Next week I start as a group leader at the Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen @mpi-nl.bsky.social 🧠 Building the Language and Predictive Computation group -- using LLMs to model language in the mind/brain, and vice versa. Hiring soon!

Nearly half of the papers in my AC pile (CoNLL) had ~nothing to do with CoNLL and were engineering papers I think like ACL confs enforces a limitations section, we should enforce a mandatory “implications for theory/linguistics/cogsci/language learning” section outside the page limit

📢 We’re now accepting applications for the 2026 School on Analytical Connectionism dedicated this year to Language Acquisition. 📍 Gothenburg, Sweden 🗓️ August 17–28, 2026 ☠️ Apply by April 17! 🔗 analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/ 👇 Meet the experts joining us this summer!

What is the relationship between memorization and generalization in AI? Is there a fundamental tradeoff? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorizati... I’ve reviewed some of the evolving perspectives on memorization & generalization in machine learning, from classic perspectives through LLMs.

Claude: For each example I can do a web search and then make a LLM call with the results... Me: Why an LLM call? Can't you just figure it out yourself? Claude: You're right, I am the LLM!

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

Hello #NLProc #ACL2026NLP people. I am looking for **two emergency reviewers** in the Safety and Alignment in LLMs track for ACL/ARR. Reviews are due Feb 15th. Please DM if interested and available. Happy to offer drinks/food if you live in/pass by Lisbon ☀️

So cooool

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

Nearly 2 years ago, @jessyjli.bsky.social, @janetlauyeung.bsky.social, @valentinapy.bsky.social, and I decided that it's time to bring discourse structure to the center of NLP teaching.

Very excited to share that the paper w/ @jessyjli.bsky.social @DavidBeaver "Strategic Dialogue Assessment: The Crooked Path to Innocence" (used to have the name COBRA) was accepted by Dialogue and Discourse Vol 17 No.1. Check it out! 👉https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/dad/article/view/14503

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵

New paper! In arxiv.org/abs/2601.20834 we study how language models representations of things like factuality evolve over a conversation. We find that in edge case conversations, e.g. about model consciousness or delusional content, model representations can change dramatically! 1/

🗣️New Preprint! I'm really excited to talk about this new short paper (w/Laura Biester) analyzing sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC). BLFC challenged writers to write the 'worst opening sentence to the most atrocious novel ever written'. This is a corpus of "bad" sentences! (1/5)

“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! 🧵

Huge congratulations to Matthew Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social, recipient of the 2026 Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building! This honor will be celebrated at #CogSci2026 with a dedicated symposium. Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/ to learn more

Hello world 👋 My first paper at UT Austin! We ask: what happens when medical “evidence” fed into an LLM is wrong? Should your AI stay faithful, or should it play it safe when the evidence is harmful? We show that frontier LLMs accept counterfactual medical evidence at face value.🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432 I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

What can cognitive science learn from AI? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-cogni... I outline how AI has found that scale and richness of learning experiences fundamentally change learning & generalization — and how I believe we should rethink cognitive experiments & theories in response.

Accepted at EACL - excited about Morocco!

This paper, written by two friends, was accepted at EACL!