'Tis the season to preprint BBS commentaries; I'm happy to share ours too! 🎄✨ The textual basis of current LLMs causes trouble, but linguistically relevant insights *can* be found in systems modelling the more natural form of human spoken language: the speech signal itself. arxiv.org/abs/2512.14506

Very excited to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rutgers University-Newark in January 2026!

My commentary on @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social excellent forthcoming BBS paper "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models". arxiv.org/abs/2512.12447 Have a read. It's 🌶️

There have also been threads from Imprint authors on their papers including this from @rkubala.bsky.social...

Big news out of Leipzig! Congrats Leonie!

We are accepting submissions for the 25th edition of the Texas Linguistics Society (TLS), a UT Austin grad-student ran Linguistics conference! The conference will run from February 20 - 21, 2026 in Austin. Abstract Deadline: December 17 Notification: January 15

A confounding thing for the linguistics of LMs: the best way to assess their grammatical ability is string probability. Yet string probability and grammaticality are famously not the same! Really excited to have this out, where we give a formal account, w/ experiments, of how to make sense of that!

Oh cool! Excited this LM + construction paper was SAC-Highlighted! Check it out to see how LM-derived measures of statistical affinity separate out constructions with similar words like "I was so happy I saw you" vs "It was so big it fell over".

Delighted Sasha's (first year PhD!) work using mech interp to study complex syntax constructions won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP! Also delighted the ACL community continues to recognize unabashedly linguistic topics like filler-gaps... and the huge potential for LMs to inform such topics!

Interested in doing a PhD at the intersection of human and machine cognition? ✨ I'm recruiting students for Fall 2026! ✨ Topics of interest include pragmatics, metacognition, reasoning, & interpretability (in humans and AI). Check out JHU's mentoring program (due 11/15) for help with your SoP 👇

Two brief advertisements! TTIC is recruiting both tenure-track and research assistant professors: ttic.edu/faculty-hiri... NYU is recruiting faculty fellows: apply.interfolio.com/174686 Happy to chat with anyone considering either of these options

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

Curious as to if people think if (when?) ‘superhuman AI’ arrives, will the building blocks of its performance be human recognizable concepts which have been applied and combined in new and novel ways to achieve ‘superhuman’ performance? Or will it be completely uninterpretable?

Come join us at the city of ACL! Very happy to chat about my experience as a new faculty at UT Ling, come find me at #COLM2025 if you’re interested!!

We’re hiring faculty as well! Happy to talk about it at COLM!

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘

I will be giving a short talk on this work at the COLM Interplay workshop on Friday (also to appear at EMNLP)! Will be in Montreal all week and excited to chat about LM interpretability + its interaction with human cognition and ling theory.

Heading to #COLM2025 to present my first paper w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social ! When: Tuesday, 11 AM – 1 PM Where: Poster #75 Happy to chat about my work and topics in computational linguistics & cogsci! Also, I'm on the PhD application journey this cycle! Paper info 👇:

I’m at #COLM2025 from Wed with: @siyuansong.bsky.social Tue am introspection arxiv.org/abs/2503.07513 @qyao.bsky.social Wed am controlled rearing: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850 @sashaboguraev.bsky.social INTERPLAY ling interp: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16002 I’ll talk at INTERPLAY too. Come say hi!

Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁 Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit: 1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850

Do you want to use AI models to understand human language? Are you fascinated by whether linguistic representations are lurking in LLMs? Are you in need of a richer model of spatial words across languages? Consider UT Austin for all your Computational Linguistics Ph.D. needs! mahowak.github.io

Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand: A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif... This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social

At UT we just got to hear about this in a zoom talk from @sfeucht.bsky.social. I echo the endorsement: cool ideas about representations in llms with linguistic relevance!

Can AI aid scientists amidst their own workflows, when they do not know step-by-step workflows and may not know, in advance, the kinds of scientific utility a visualization would bring? Check out @sebajoe.bsky.social’s feature on ✨AstroVisBench:

Simon Goldstein and I have a new paper, “What does ChatGPT want? An interpretationist guide”. The paper argues for three main claims. philpapers.org/rec/GOLWDC-2 1/7

📣@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