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!

Not much for resolutions but I really wanna say "No" more this year. NO!

Does our "semantic space" get stuck in the past as we age? New work by @ellscain.bsky.social uses historical embeddings + behavioral data to show we are truly lifelong learners. Older adults don't rely on historical meanings—they update them to match current language! 🧠✨ doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

One of my most cherished parts of writing a paper is writing its limitations section — I have no idea why (no psychoanalysis pls)

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Work with Sean!!

Very excited to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rutgers University-Newark in January 2026!

Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3

Work with Leonie!! 🦁

R/ggplot needs more solid shapes -- do ppl agree?

🥳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!

@najoung.bsky.social and I did a side quest during NeurIPS and gave a joint talk at UCSD on our thoughts about the role of NNs/LLMs in Human CogSci! Thanks @alexwarstadt.bsky.social and Rachel Dudley for hosting us! Catch our slides here: docs.google.com/presentation...

Did I spend about an hour making this title slide? Yes. Did it come at the cost of prepping the actual talk? It did. But.. was it all worth it in the end? No, no it wasn't.

📢 Postdoc position 📢 I’m recruiting a postdoc for my lab at NYU! Topics include LM reasoning, creativity, limitations of scaling, AI for science, & more! Apply by Feb 1. (Different from NYU Faculty Fellows, which are also great but less connected to my lab.) Link in 🧵

Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!

New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46

I’ll be at NeurIPS this week spending time at the hallway track (most of conf), the poster session on Wednesday, and later at the workshops! @yuluqin.bsky.social will be presenting our paper (arxiv.org/abs/2507.13328) in the Weds. poster session! Say hi, esp. if you’ve applied to do a PhD w/ me!

Excited to have Rachel and Deborah present their work here at UT!

Najoung = one of the most nuanced thinkers in the field! Go get trained by her! 🐨 🤖

🤖🧠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