📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Provocative piece and more interesting than most that have been written about this topic. I greatly encourage people to weigh in! My own perspective is that while there is utility to LMs, the scientific insights are greatly overstated.

📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Congrats to Leonie on the new gig! Surely though she will mess our Texas summers.

Can AI introspect? Surprisingly tricky to define what that means! And also interesting to test. New work from @siyuansong.bsky.social, @harveylederman.bsky.social, @jennhu.bsky.social and me on introspection in LLMs. See paper and thread for a definition and some experiments!

Lovely write up by @ksetiya.bsky.social on @rkubala.bsky.social’s piece on the art of crosswords! Come for Robbie, stay for Sondheim crossword quotes. ksetiya.substack.com/p/compositio...

Happy to share the published version of "Art, Understanding, and Mystery"! I often hear some version of the thought that it's bad to understand artworks; this paper attempts to make that claim precise and show one way to defend artistic understanding! journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

Is there any work on conditionals like '[Larry David is making a new show with the Obamas.] If Susie Essman is involved, hooray!'? It seems really hard to make sense of it on most of the approaches to conditionals/expressives that I'm aware of, but I'm curious if people know stuff or have thoughts.

Check it out if you're at SCiL! Fun tool for easily getting semantic projections from word embeddings into interpretable space.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

My paper just came out in PPR today, here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... It's about interesting relationships that our attitudes bear to the world. I argue that belief is very different from other attitudes, and this difference follows from its relationship to the truth of token contents.

So excited to welcome @kanishka.bsky.social (back) to UT!

News🗞️ I will return to UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics this fall, and join its vibrant community of Computational Linguists, NLPers, and Cognitive Scientists!🤘 Excited to develop ideas about linguistic and conceptual generalization (recruitment details soon!)

No. We are opting for simplicity. It doesn't help to pile targeted interventions, even if each makes a lot of sense on its own. The key to our process is the ACs, so we just want to help them

We believe this work shows how mechanistic analyses can provide novel insights into syntactic structures — making good on the promise that studying LLMs can help us better understand linguistics by helping us develop linguistically interesting hypotheses! 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16002

Do the causal mechanism underlying filler-gap processing in models transfer across constructions? We find yes … but with some wrinkles. Check out the paper_t that Sasha wrote ___t!

A key hypothesis in the history of linguistics is that different constructions share underlying structure. We take advantage of recent advances in mechanistic interpretability to test this hypothesis in Language Models. New work with @kmahowald.bsky.social and @cgpotts.bsky.social! 🧵👇!

Come by to our panel at APS to share your thoughts, and ask us all the hard stuff!

At APS in DC, thrilled to be moderating a panel on statistics and abstraction in cognition with 3 stars: Jay McClelland, Tom Griffiths @cocoscilab.bsky.social, and @adinawilliams.bsky.social at 1pm tmrw. Bayes. Neural nets. Linguistics…we’ll have it all! www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

@rkubala.bsky.social, @adamlovett.bsky.social, and I have a new paper forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. It’s called “On the value of irreplaceable objects” – Here’s a thread! philpapers.org/rec/KUBOTV 1/n

Delighted to have Elias joining the UT NLP community!

What do "Maui, Sicily, Thailand" have in common? Ok, "places". But I say "White Lotus locales": it would be quite a coincidence if I hit on all 3 by chance! We ask how LMs do at this kind of inference. Also fun to do a study on "the number game", the first Bayesian cogsci I learned in grad school!

I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!

Writing my first post here to announce that I've accepted an assistant professor job at TTIC! I'll be starting in Fall 2026, and recruiting students this upcoming cycle. Until then, I'll be wrapping up the PhD at Berkeley, and this summer I'll join NYU as a CDS Faculty Fellow 🏙️

PINEAPPLE, LIGHT, HAPPY, AVALANCHE, BURDEN Some of these words are consistently remembered better than others. Why is that? In our paper, just published in J. Exp. Psychol., we provide a simple Bayesian account and show that it explains >80% of variance in word memorability: tinyurl.com/yf3md5aj

@kmahowald.bsky.social with a beautiful high-tech illustration 🎨 while describing @qyao.bsky.social's latest paper at the HSP online seminar series! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

Will be talking about this work (and more) at 2 ET/11 PT in the HSP talk series on Computational Language Models and Psycholinguistics! www.hspsociety.org

If you give a mouse a cookie....does an LM learn something different than if you "give a cookie to a mouse"? Or if you don't give anyone anything? Or if you do other weird stuff to the input? New paper on manipulating ling input and training small LMs to study direct vs indirect evidence.

LMs learn argument-based preferences for dative constructions (preferring recipient first when it’s shorter), consistent with humans. Is this from memorizing preferences in training? New paper w/ @kanishka.bsky.social , @weissweiler.bsky.social , @kmahowald.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

If you give a mouse a cookie....does an LM learn something different than if you "give a cookie to a mouse"? Or if you don't give anyone anything? Or if you do other weird stuff to the input? New paper on manipulating ling input and training small LMs to study direct vs indirect evidence.

Check out our new work on introspection in LLMs! 🔍 TL;DR we find no evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own knowledge. Beyond the study of LLM introspection, our findings inform an ongoing debate in linguistics research: prompting (eg grammaticality judgments) =/= prob measurement!

Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.07513 Again, thanks to my amazing advisors @jennhu.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social for their guidance and support! (8/8)

If I ask model A “is this sentence grammatical” and it says yes, does that mean model A is more likely to produce that sentence than model B? Check out our new paper on whether models introspect about knowledge of language.

I'm excited to announce two papers of ours which will be presented this summer at @naaclmeeting.bsky.social eting.bsky.social and @iclr-conf.bsky.social ! 🧵

Check it out for cool plots like this about how affinities between words in sentences and how they can show how Green Day isn't like green paint or green tea. And congrats to @coryshain.bsky.social and the CLiMB lab! climblab.org

I just had a chance to watch this fantastic talk. I really recommend it for anyone interested in how LLMs can help us understand language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBor...

Looking forward to speaking tomorrow (Tues am) in this Simons workshop in Berkeley simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ll.... Will talk about some empirical work and also share some takes from this recent preprint from me and @futrell.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047

LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.

Now most *urgently*: we review the history of these models. A straight line can be traced to modern AI from basic science. Not in engineering but in the cognitive science of language. Much of it funded by NSF, whose funding has now been paused. www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/pdp

LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.

This is a beautiful paper! The first third helpfully labels a stream of recent work in philosophy of AI as "propositional interpretability". The idea is to use propositional attitudes like belief, desire, and intention, to help explain AI in a way that we can understand. 1/n

Quanta write-up of our Mission: Impossible Language Models work, led by @juliekallini.bsky.social. As the photos suggest, Richard, @isabelpapad.bsky.social, and I do all our work sitting together around a single laptop and pointing at the screen.

If this is anything like the live version at the LSA (and it seems to be!), it's worth watching for an inspiring vision for how linguistics and LLMs can fit together...and, as this slide near the end shows, how linguistic phenomena can be described neurally, artificial-neurally, or symbolically.

I like the NLP reference in "Walking in a Winter Wonderland", where they say "In the meadow, we can build a snowman / Then pretend that he is parsin' [the] Brown [corpus]"

LSA president Tony Woodbury on Sapir's idea that each language has its own "genius", and that each language should be described with its own framework, rather than through a general ("theoretical") framework. muse.jhu.edu/article/948426

I defended my PhD at MIT Brain&Cog last week--so much gratitude to my advisor @evfedorenko.bsky.social, as well as my committee @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and Yoon Kim. Thank you to all my brilliant collaborators and the MIT community. I have loved this journey so much.

In Vancouver for #NeurIPS2024 workshops! At Math-AI tomorrow @sashaboguraev.bsky.social is presenting our experiment-infused position piece on the communicative nature of math and why that matters for AI arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17005. Say hi! Will be better than the Panthers 4-0 loss to the Canucks.

Christian Uffmann wins linguist prof of 2024. This video is iconic. Definitely worth watching and I say this as someone who is terminally not interested in watching video content. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSOl...

Cool project! And very impressed by the first author’s choice of last name and also university.

Three ManyBabies projects - big collaborative replications of infancy phenomena - wrapped up this year. The first paper came out this fall. I thought I'd take this chance to comment on what I make of the non-replication result. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/laur...