. @gneubig.bsky.social and I are co-teaching a new class on LM inference this fall! We designed this class to give a broad view on the space, from more classical decoding algorithms to recent methods for LLMs, plus a wide range of efficiency-focused work. website: phontron.com/class/lminfe...

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

super excited to see folks at #NAACL25 this week! I'll be presenting our work on long-context ICL Wednesday in the 2pm poster session in Hall 3-- would love to chat with folks there or at the rest of the conference about long context data, ICL, inference time methods, New Mexican food, etc :)

How can we better think and talk about human-like qualities attributed to language technologies like LLMs? In our #CHI2025 paper, we taxonomize how text outputs from cases of user interactions with language technologies can contribute to anthropomorphism. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09870 1/n

9.6 million seconds = 1 PhD 🔥 Finally analyzed my PhD time tracking data so you can plan your own research journey more effectively: mxij.me/x/phd-learning-dynamics For current students: I hope this helps put your journey into perspective. Wishing you all the best!

When I started on ARL project that funds my PhD, the thing we were supposed to build was a "MaterialsGPT". What is a MaterialsGPT? Where does that idea come from? I got to spend a lot of time thinking about that second question with @davidthewid.bsky.social and Lucy Suchman (!) working on this:

📢 NEW Paper! @siree.sh, Lucy Suchman, and I examine a corpus of 7,000 US Military grant solicitations to ask what the world’s largest military wants with to do with AI, by looking at what it seeks to fund. #STS 📄: arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17840 We find…

when you try to convert your text into smaller pieces but all it gives you is Elvish, that’s a tolkienizer

That’s right. You might think that all successful CS academics are good at running. But that’s only because the ones who weren’t, have been eaten by bears.

💬 Have you or a loved one compared LM probabilities to human linguistic acceptability judgments? You may be overcompensating for the effect of frequency and length! 🌟 In our new paper, we rethink how we should be controlling for these factors 🧵:

I'm keeping track of people at the CMU Language Technologies Institute here: go.bsky.app/NhTwCVb. Follow along!

Today is the day!! Find me at 2 PM in the Jasmine Hall (the one on the floor near food).

(Hehe first bsky post!) I'll be at #EMNLP2024 💃🌴! Happy to chat about (among other things): ✨linguistically+cognitively motivated evaluation ✨NLP for low-resource+endangered languages ✨figuring out what features of language data LMs are *actually* learning I'll be presenting two posters 🧵:

Taking a stand that we aren’t doing the #nlproc tag here. It’s #nlp. We used #nlproc because a decade ago the #nlp tag was full of sleazy scammers selling guides for hypnotizing women into sleeping with you. But guess what? We won. All the sleazy scammers are doing natural language processing now.

Building/customizing your own LLM? You'll want to curate training data for it, but how do you know what makes the data good? You can try out recipes👩‍🍳 iterate on ✨vibes✨ but we can't actually test all possible combos of tweaks,,, right?? 🙅‍♂️WRONG! arxiv.org/abs/2410.15661 (1/n) 🧵

bsky.app/profile/sire... it was so interesting to see participants' perceptions of "paradigm shifts" paralleled across eras and cycles of NLP, and at the same time nothing until recent years had reached quite the level of *47%* of ACL papers in 2021 citing BERT

We all know that “recently large language models have”, “large language models are”, and “large language models can.” But *why* LLMs? How did we get here? (where is “here”?) What forces are shaping NLP, and how recent are they, actually? To appear at EMNLP 2023: arxiv.org/abs/2310.07715

Talking to the youths in 2023: did you know that "podcast" comes from a pun on "broadcast" plus the Apple iPod, a precursor to the iPhone that only played music Talking to the youths in 2043: did you know that "tweet" comes from a pun on Twitter, a precursor to various shortform social media