My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

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 🧵

We are thrilled to officially announce the dates of the 46th edition of 𝗧𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗗𝗔𝗚! Save the date for 𝗧𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭𝟭–𝟭𝟮 💫⁣

📣 I'm hiring 📣 Post-doc position at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social as part of @rug.nl CIT Innovation Fun "A3i – Artificial Intelligence Innovation Identifier" Full call is available here: lnkd.in/esdQ7YGD 📅 Application deadline: Jan. 15 2026

👀 Look what 🎅 has broght just before Christmas 🎁: a brand new Research Master in Natural Language Processing at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social @rug.nl Program: www.rug.nl/masters/natu... Applications (2026/2027) are open! Come and study with us (you will also learn why we have a 🐮 in our logo)

The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a fantastic friend and researcher, @mdhk.net , who came to visit us in Groningen for a couple of days from Amsterdam! 🎉

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨ @byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸 Keynotes by @jennysaffran.bsky.social @noranewcombe.bsky.social @pyoudeyer.bsky.social More info to follow #IASL26

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

Interested in developmentally plausible LMs, and the role of child-directed language data? Come to our poster TODAY (Fr 7 Nov, 10.30-12.00) #EMNLP!

Thrilled to be heading to Suzhou with a big team of GroNLP'ers 🐮 Interested in Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource LMs? Don't miss our posters & talks #EMNLP2025!

...ii) a direct quality reward from a teacher model, and iii) a reward based on the log probabilities of a teacher model (and its dialogue continuations). While these rewards did not improve our models performance, two different DPO approaches did!

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 cpl2025.sites.uu.nl When: December 18–19, 2025 Where: Utrecht, the Netherlands Abstract submission deadline: June 15, 2025 Organizers: Jakub Dotlačil, Lena Jäger, Bruno Nicenboim, Ece Takmaz

Jane Goodall (1934-2025) 🤍

My very first book review is out now 📚 Muchas gracias to @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for inviting me, looking forward to our next project(s) 😇

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐂 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 (𝐄𝐑𝐂 𝐂𝐨𝐆, 𝐏𝐈 𝐀𝐧𝐚 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐟) 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫! ⁣🎉 ⁣ We have an opening for a 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 for a starting duration of 12 months extendible to 30 months.⁣ For further details -> www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀’ 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻! 😍 Here are some photos of our GroNLP station at the Forum, where we welcomed high school classes and potential future researchers. 🧑‍🔬🤖 Quizzes, puzzles, demos, card games, and of course, lots of chocolate! 🍫

The 𝗜𝗟𝗖𝗕 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 in Marseille went beyond all my expectations! 💯 A week has already flown by since I had one of the most formative experiences of my PhD so far. 👩‍🎨

We recharged our batteries with a wonderful weekend together in the province of Drenthe! 🌳🍃 As per tradition, we kick off the academic year with plenty of sharing, smiles, and sports 💘 We wish everyone a wonderful start of the academic year <3 may it be inspiring and exciting 🎓

Rowena Garcia is presenting research at #ISB15 showing that #crosslinguistic #priming occurs across #typologically unrelated languages & without overlap of constituent order. The degree of overlap modulated the magnitude of the effect. #Tagalog #Indonesian #English @isbilingualism.bsky.social

#ACL2025 has just finished and it was great to meet with old friends and connect with new colleagus. In case you missed our papers/presentations, this was us 🐮👇 @facultyofartsug.bsky.social

Fabulous blog about screentime from Gonzales, Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek here 1/ childandfamilyblog.com/children-and...

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social

Excited to welcome a new member to the family of language-specific BLiMPs 🎊 this time putting Turkish in the spotlight! Thanks to the meticulous, linguistically grounded work of the brilliant @ezgibasar.bsky.social. We hope will help push forward research on typologically diverse languages!

“Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models” I’m happy to share that the preprint of my first PhD project is now online! 🎊 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23689

Few days back 🍦 celebrating spring, sunshine, and one of our most cherished lab member! Nothing like ice cream and an indulgent break to mark a birthday the Computational Linguistics way ☀️🎉 #GroNLP #ComputationalLinguistics #SpringVibes

🚀 #ILCB #SummerSchool 2025 – Apply Now! 🌞🧠 Join us Sept 1-5, 2025 at CIRM, Marseille to explore Language, Cognition & the Brain! 🗣 Language & Cognition | 🧠 Neuroscience 🤖 AI & Machine Learning | 📊 Math & Stats 📅 Apply by May 23 → www.ilcb.fr/2025-2/ Know someone interested? Tag & share! 📢

Tomorrow at lunch, I’m giving a talk: “Discovering Linguistic Abstractions”. I’ll share @abstractionerc.bsky.social research projects (PI: @mariannabolog.bsky.social ) at the Linguistic Lunch @facultyofartsug.bsky.social. Thanks @frap98.bsky.social for the invite!

Modern LLMs "speak" hundreds of languages... but do they really? Multilinguality claims are often based on downstream tasks like QA & MT, while *formal* linguistic competence remains hard to gauge in lots of languages Meet MultiBLiMP! (joint work w/ @jumelet.bsky.social & @weissweiler.bsky.social)

✨New paper ✨ Introducing 🌍MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Minimal Pairs for Subject-Verb Agreement, covering 101 languages! We present over 125,000 minimal pairs and evaluate 17 LLMs, finding that support is still lacking for many languages. 🧵⬇️

Small delay, but critical not to overlook the importance of it. ✊🏻 On March 18th, the academic community in Groningen took to the streets to protest the Dutch government's crazy direction to substantially cut funding to university and higher education. ✂️

We just released the first version of our German BabyLM corpus: huggingface.co/datasets/bbu... It contains 16.5M words of (more or less) developmentally plausible, child-directed, child-produced or at least child-available speech 🤓

This 4-year salaried position will soon open to candidates with proved expertise and interest in the areas of computational linguistics/NLP and computational cognitive modeling. Here's a preview: yevgen.web.rug.nl/phd.pdf

📣 Soon-to-open PhD position @gronlp.bsky.social: Come work with Annemarie van Dooren, @yevgenm.bsky.social and myself on a new project bridging Computational Linguistics methods and Language Acquisition questions, with a focus on the learning of modal verbs.

The words I usually spend explaining to friends, family, and lay people what I am about and what the focus of my PhD is... here they are condensed into a concise and clear article. 🖌️ Small is good, small is precious, small has potential ! 👶✨ www.quantamagazine.org/why-do-resea...

Excited to be traveling to Estonia for the 1st time to give a keynote @nodalida.bsky.social. I'll talk about using NNs to study language evolution & acquisition. A teaser: It won't be about LLMs 🙃 Also I've just moved from X, so this was my very first post... Pls help out by connecting with me!

Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement, and Sustainability A few days ago, I had the opportunity to present my PhD project and some preliminary research findings at the first edition of CLADES 🚀

✨ Keynote Speaker Reveal! ✨ We are thrilled to announce that Professor Jane Setter will be a keynote speaker at the 45th edition of Tabu Dag! #TabuDag2025 #Linguistics #Groningen #CLCG #UniversityOfGroningen

Big congratulations to Dr. @jumelet.bsky.social for obtaining his PhD today and crafting a beautiful thesis full of original and insightful work!! 🎉 arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16433?

Humans learn language from situated communicative interactions. And that makes all the difference! Find out why in our latest article in Computational Linguistics: doi.org/10.1162/coli... #CompLing #CxG #LLMs #NLProc

Our piece is finally out in the Imminent blog! 🎉It presents preliminary findings of our recent study evaluating the usefulness of word-level quality estimation in real-world post-editing settings (paper forthcoming)! 🧵1/ imminent.translated.com/can-word-lev...

Inaugurating my bsky account by calling #EMNLP2024 a wrap! Had lots of fun presenting our work with @danielsc4.bsky.social and Jirui, and partied hard at the RiTA 🇮🇹 meetup (60+ people joined!). See you next year in Suzhou! 🇨🇳