@sebastianraschka.com Hey, a fellow listener to @atp.fm (I infer from today's show, 26:55). I have often wondered whether the audience for that show overlapped with my AI/NLP network.

I misunderstood a reference to "Music from Big Pink" in Tyler Cowen's recent interview with Joe Boyd, and now I have spent an entire weekend listening to the band "The Big Pink" on a loop – absolutely perfect for a lost weekend at one's desk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big...

I've posted the practice run of my LSA keynote. My core claim is that LLMs can be useful tools for doing close linguistic analysis. I illustrate with a detailed case study, drawing on corpus evidence, targeted syntactic evaluations, and causal intervention-based analyses: youtu.be/DBorepHuKDM

I am confident OpenAI will become profitable. They are smart, creative, highly incentivized, and well-funded. On the other hand, any app/company that depends on capturing most of the value from OpenAI's models has an uncertain future, like the Twitter apps of old.

Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad. I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.

Announcement #1: our call for papers is up! 🎉 colmweb.org/cfp.html And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social

Ok but this last episode of Bob’s Burgers was so wonderful #bobsburgers

MoEUT: Mixture-of-Experts Universal Transformers Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East

ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models Spotlight Poster Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]

Papers (partly) from @stanfordnlp at #NeurIPS 2024: Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]

My primary role as a Department Chair at Stanford has become complaining about bureaucratic overreach at Stanford. I have send dozens of messages on this topic just this quarter. And yet I have still not mastered the spelling of "bureaucratic".

Natural Language Processing—artificial intelligence that uses human language—has been on a roll lately. You’ve probably noticed! So the Stanford NLP Group has been growing, and diversifying into lots of new topics, including agents, language model programs, and socially aware #NLP. nlp.stanford.edu

Listening to this awesome talk from @cgpotts.bsky.social .. so in love with the message here .. As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving .. youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...

Article on compositionality with @cgpotts.bsky.social in the new MIT Open encyclopedia of cognitive science! Check it out here: oecs.mit.edu/pub/e222wyjy.... Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and Michael Frank for the opportunity!

This video should have 175B likes. It's an insightful commentary on intellectual property, the creator economy, and social media anxiety, and it's also just really catchy.

TNT BOOM GAME

Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024, with many AI luminaries as panelists. Poster submissions are open: lu.ma/q5r8b67t

Hi friends, colleagues, followers. I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student @berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵

Lena is a masterful Borgesian fiction imagining the first human brain to be captured on disk. The program enters a state of "terror and extreme panic" on boot-up. If you deny that a machine could be sentient, do you deny the story's premise or the potential reality of such terror? qntm.org/mmacevedo

If you would like to weird yourself out about time and cultural evolution, I recommend back-to-back consumption of the opening to The Simpsons 26.1, 99pi 114, and Lieberman et al., "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language". youtu.be/8zY9z7IP-1Q?... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-...

I've been going through the Wordle archives seeking to achieve a mind-meld with WordleBot, and I finally did it (in a puzzle from winter 2024). I appreciate that it even seems to have known this was my goal.

For PhD recommendation systems: this year, as in every year in my experience, MIT EECS gets my highest recommendation: (1) one subjective multiple choice question that does not really try to hide its subjectivity behind made-up numbers and (2) letter upload. I wish my own institution's were as good.

There's a known bug in how we compute "word" probabilities with subword-based LMs that mark beginnings of words -- as pointed out by Byung-doh Oh and Will Schuler, & @tpimentel.bsky.social and Clara Meister I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!

You're a muppet

I'm excited to kick off my Bluesky presence with wonderful news: Our paper "Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users' Image Description Preferences" won a Best Paper Award at the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at EMNLP! Read it here: aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-...