🤖🧠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_...

Nice to see the practice of using minimal pairs being formalized!

if you’ve had Szechuan peppercorns do you experience them more as a) tingly (like a vibration) or b) numbing (like super weak lidocaine) ~And~ are you colorblind (we‘d need to correct for base rates but let’s just try to crank the anecdata knob first; @elenatenenbaum.bsky.social this is for you)

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

Delighted Sasha's (first year PhD!) work using mech interp to study complex syntax constructions won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP! Also delighted the ACL community continues to recognize unabashedly linguistic topics like filler-gaps... and the huge potential for LMs to inform such topics!

Never did I imagine I'll hear "Dhoom Machale" at an election victory party in the US! LFG!

I’ll be in Boston attending BUCLD this week — I won’t be presenting but I’ll be cheering on @najoung.bsky.social who will present at the prestigious SLD symposium about the awesome work by her group, including our work on LMs as hypotheses generators for language acquisition! 🤠👻

N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

The psychology program at NYU Abu Dhabi has open rank open area positions in cognition-perception-cogneuro. Wonderful colleagues, excellent research infrastructure (incl MRI, MEG, EEG), close ties to NYU New York. Superfast growing part of the research world apply.interfolio.com/175417 #neuroskyence

🧠 New at #NeurIPS2025! 🎵 We're far from the shallow now🎵 TL;DR: We introduce the first "reasoning embedding" and uncover its unique spatio-temporal pattern in the brain. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2510.228...

Introducing Global PIQA, a new multilingual benchmark for 100+ languages. This benchmark is the outcome of this year’s MRL shared task, in collaboration with 300+ researchers from 65 countries. This dataset evaluates physical commonsense reasoning in culturally relevant contexts.

Our #NeurIPS2025 paper shows that even comparable monolingual tokenizers have different compression rates across languages. But by getting rid of whitespace tokenization and using a custom vocab size for each language, we can reduce token premiums. Preprint out now!

Check out UT Linguistics very own Austin German's new article on interaction and variation in Z Sign in @glossa-linguistics.bsky.social

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

If I spill the tea—“Did you know Sue, Max’s gf, was a tennis champ?”—but then if you reply “They’re dating?!” I’d be a bit puzzled, since that’s not the main point! Humans can track what’s ‘at issue’ in conversation. How sensitive are LMs to this distinction? New paper w/ @sangheekim.bsky.social!

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io

"Although I hate leafy vegetables, I prefer daxes to blickets." Can you tell if daxes are leafy vegetables? LM's can't seem to! 📷 We investigate if LMs capture these inferences from connectives when they cannot rely on world knowledge. New paper w/ Daniel, Will, @jessyjli.bsky.social

Curious as to if people think if (when?) ‘superhuman AI’ arrives, will the building blocks of its performance be human recognizable concepts which have been applied and combined in new and novel ways to achieve ‘superhuman’ performance? Or will it be completely uninterpretable?

We're hiring! UT Linguistics invites applications for a position in computational linguistics to begin next academic year 2026-27 (rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure). apply.interfolio.com/175156

Happening now! Poster 42!

Catch Qing’s poster in the morning poster session today!! I’ll also be there, talk to me about UT Ling’s new comp ling job/methods to study linguistic generalization/and how LMs *might* inform language science!

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘

Come join us at the city of ACL! Very happy to chat about my experience as a new faculty at UT Ling, come find me at #COLM2025 if you’re interested!!

I will be giving a short talk on this work at the COLM Interplay workshop on Friday (also to appear at EMNLP)! Will be in Montreal all week and excited to chat about LM interpretability + its interaction with human cognition and ling theory.

On my way to #COLM2025 🍁 Check out jessyli.com/colm2025 QUDsim: Discourse templates in LLM stories arxiv.org/abs/2504.09373 EvalAgent: retrieval-based eval targeting implicit criteria arxiv.org/abs/2504.15219 RoboInstruct: code generation for robotics with simulators arxiv.org/abs/2405.20179

I’m at #COLM2025 from Wed with: @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue am introspection arxiv.org/abs/2503.07513 @qyao.bsky.social Wed am controlled rearing: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850 @sashaboguraev.bsky.social INTERPLAY ling interp: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16002 I’ll talk at INTERPLAY too. Come say hi!

Heading to #COLM2025 to present my first paper w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social ! When: Tuesday, 11 AM – 1 PM Where: Poster #75 Happy to chat about my work and topics in computational linguistics & cogsci! Also, I'm on the PhD application journey this cycle! Paper info 👇:

Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁 Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit: 1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

All of us (@kanishka.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social and me) are looking for PhD students this cycle! If computational linguistics/NLP is your passion, join us at UT Austin! For my areas see jessyli.com

The compling group at UT Austin (sites.utexas.edu/compling/) is looking for PhD students! Come join me, @kmahowald.bsky.social, and @jessyjli.bsky.social as we tackle interesting research questions at the intersection of ling, cogsci, and ai! Some topics I am particularly interested in:

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

Friendship ended with minicons, glazing is my new fav package!

I've found it kind of a pain to work with resources like VerbNet, FrameNet, PropBank (frame files), and WordNet using existing tools. Maybe you have too. Here's a little package that handles data management, loading, and cross-referencing via either a CLI or a python API.

Love to start the day by mistakenly stumbling onto hate speech against south-asians ty internet

Accepted at #NeurIPS2025! So proud of Yulu and Dheeraj for leading this! Be on the lookout for more "nuanced yes/no" work from them in the future 👀

Abstract deadline changed to *December 1, 2025*

📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happy and proud to see @rjantonello.bsky.social’s work awarded by SNL!

Exhibit N on how synthetic text/AI detectors just don't work reliably. Generating some (long) sentences from GPT4.1 and GPT5 with the same prompt, the top open-source model on the RAID benchmark classifies most GPT4.1 outputs as synthetic and most GPT5 as not synthetic.

Super happy with Cogsci program assistant Chris Kent's work for our college Instagram feed. Glad I could get our Loki featured to advertise my class.

Excited to speak alongside such an illustrious set of speakers!

Lovely write up by @ksetiya.bsky.social on @rkubala.bsky.social’s piece on the art of crosswords! Come for Robbie, stay for Sondheim crossword quotes. ksetiya.substack.com/p/compositio...

🤖 🧠 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

Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient. @icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

The Echoes in AI paper showed quite the opposite with also a story continuation setup. Additionally, we present evidence that both *syntactic* and *discourse* diversity measures show strong homogenization that lexical and cosine used in this paper do not capture.

ACL shortpaper appreciation thread because shortpapers are the best papers. What's the best <=5 pager? I'm nominating an oldie but a goodie

Why does neurips hide the reviewers' updated scores (or lack thereof)? "this is to maximize misery for everyone" - aptly described by @najoung.bsky.social

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

can someone pls remove the "em-dashes" feature from all LLMs??? I refuse to give up on 'em

Doug’s papers on concepts and categories (along with Smith, Murphy) had a heavy influence on me during PhD! So happy his work was recognized!!! And such a powerful speech too 🙏