✨ We are hiring @crestumr.bsky.social ✨ Post-doc position, up to 3 years, in a Horizon project. Profile: at the intersection of NLP & Social Sciences. More information here: shorturl.at/TxDLN 🥰 RT appreciated 🥰

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.

What is cultural awareness in LLMs & what has been done in the literature for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion & methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness? This survey answers all these questions: doi.org/10.1162/COLI... #NLProc

I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology. The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome. Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷

terrible (...we go there a lot)

It's crazy and terrible to eliminate SBE, and especially the idea NSF would do it in violation of Congressional direction. Even if you only cared about AI, it's important. SBE's support of opinion data has crucially helped AI alignment research; for example, data from GSS for LLM eval & modeling.

evergreen

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

deleted a QT discussing a shockingly sexist email written by roger schank. these people were so evil just seeing their emails is not good

I am flabbergasted I am by how much vibe coding has expanded my capacities as a scientist and teacher. In the last few weeks, I've mocked up class demos of a live turing test, generated cross-references for an encyclopedia, and prototyped new tablet tasks for developmental psych. It's wild.

to turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app select the icon in the top left corner go to settings go to content and media make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off

Paul's back and he nails it here

✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨ And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes! Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc... Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR) #NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP @aclmeeting.bsky.social

"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

re @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com on NSF support for the web www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees... -- the NSF specifically gave $3.7M just for Mosaic www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/... and $4.6M for a related effort www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

i agree, huge change. also as a reviewer, it used to be other reviewers on a paper were non-anonymous. when i was junior, i found this motivating and conducive to learning & community-building - i might see a review i admired, then learn more about the reviewer's work and their way of thinking.

Great connections between our linguistics department and the CICS NLP program (including Katrin Erk now in a joint appointment). Also happy to communicate with prospective applicants.

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

the way this is going the only trustworthy information will be from in-person interviews. for annotation projects i find it much easier to trust small numbers of expert or local students annotators, compared to broad-audience online recruiting

i can’t believe how terrible larry summers is

(1/2) 🎉 New preprint: "Contextual Morphologically-Guided Tokenization for Latin Encoder Models" w/ @diyclassics.bsky.social @brenocon.bsky.social

The massacre of the ethics/safety teams and the internal reorientation away from anything that hinted at broader purpose (with exception for the more profitable bits of natsec) is a story that has yet to be properly told.

Your regular reminder that NSF is required by US law to support increasing the participation of historically less represented groups in science and technology fields

and (i believe) tal is presenting this work at the umass linguistics colloquium, this friday! ILC S211 at 3:30pm

Here’s a #COLM2025 feed! Pin it 📌 to follow along with the conference this week!

I have a new blog post about the so-called “tokenizer-free” approach to language modeling and why it’s not tokenizer-free at all. I also talk about why people hate tokenizers so much!

My #UMassAmherst colleagues Jen Lundquist and Kathy Forde ran a great workshop - "Reclaim the Narrative" at UMass last week on helping university staff and faculty tell stories about the importance of the work we do for our students and for society as a whole.

great paper! we already found it useful to inform another ongoing project (in more of a health domain; many domains face similar issues)

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

UMSI is running multiple searches this year, starting with the John Derby Evans Professor in Information, at the Assistant or Associate level! This is open to anyone working at the intersection of tech and society, with a closing date of Nov 1, 2025. Please share! www.si.umich.edu/people/facul...

LLMs introduce a huge range of new capabilities for research, but also make it possible for researchers to "hack" their results in new ways by how they chose to use models for annotation This is a useful pass at quantifying some of the risk, and some mitigation strategies arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

this is really bad (CW suicide discussion. a lot of it, thanks to chatgpt)

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

GPT-5 lands first place on NoCha, our long-context book understanding benchmark. That said, this is a tiny improvement (~1%) over o1-preview, which was released almost one year ago. Have long-context models hit a wall? Accuracy of human readers is >97%... Long way to go!

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

Check this out! Happy to talk to folks about Valley living, feel free to DM.

You basically got it. He said "I would love to see the people who hire graduating PhD students say with a straight face right now that they would go ahead and hire students who had *only* done work on the small models that you were describing." (The full stream is available on underline)

The #ACL2025 #ACL2025NLP feed is up and running! It matches both hashtags and any posts from or mentions of @aclmeeting.bsky.social Pin it to your home 📌 and enjoy! bsky.app/profile/did:...

#acl2025 anyone get a good quote of phil resnik's last comment? context: (some?all?) panelists & him agree the field needs more deep, careful research on smaller models to do better science. everyone is frustrated with impossibility of large-scale pretraining experiments

Excited to present two papers at #ACL2025! 🗓️30 July, 11 AM: 𝛿-Stance: A Large-Scale Real World Dataset of Stances in Legal Argumentation. w/ Douglas Rice and @brenocon.bsky.social 📍At Hall 4/5. 🧵👇

🗓️29 July, 4 PM: Automated main concept generation for narrative discourse assessment in aphasia. w/ @marisahudspeth.bsky.social, Polly Stokes, Jacquie Kurland, and @brenocon.bsky.social 📍Hall 4/5. Come by to chat about argumentation, narrative texts, policy & law, and beyond! #ACL2025NLP

Highlighting this thread. Based on what I'm seeing at #ic2s2 this week, this line of work is hot (if a bit crowded), but I predict will only be more widely adopted by social scientists in the future.

🥳 🎉 ❤️ The ACL 2025 Proceedings are live on the ACL Anthology 🥰 ! We’re thrilled to pre-celebrate the incredible research 📚 ✨ that will be presented starting Monday next week in Vienna 🇦🇹 ! Start exploring 👉 aclanthology.org/events/acl-2... #NLProc #ACL2025NLP #ACLAnthology

Unfortunately I'm missing #ic2s2 but our work on practical event extraction & analyzing international news coverage bias will be presented there as well! this work --

🥲 The cost to future society will be much more than the dollars they think they’re saving #mathsky www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-...