🔈For the SoLaR workshop @COLM_conf we are soliciting opinion abstracts to encourage new perspectives and opinions on responsible language modeling, 1-2 of which will be selected to be presented at the workshop. Please use the google form below to submit your opinion abstract ⬇️

I'll be at #ACL2025🇦🇹!! Would love to chat about all things pragmatics 🧠, redefining "helpfulness"🤔 and enabling better cross-cultural capabilities 🗺️ 🫶 Presenting our work on culturally offensive nonverbal gestures 👇 🕛Wed @ Poster Session 4 📍Hall 4/5, 11:00-12:30

Hand gestures are a major mode of human communication, but they don't always translate well across cultures. New research from @akhilayerukola.bsky.social, @maartensap.bsky.social and others is aimed at giving AI systems a hand with overcoming cultural biases: lti.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

🖋️ Curious how writing differs across (research) cultures? 🚩 Tired of “cultural” evals that don't consult people? We engaged with interdisciplinary researchers to identify & measure ✨cultural norms✨in scientific writing, and show that❗LLMs flatten them❗ 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00784 [1/11]

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 organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!! Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e... Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE #COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

Yes! tbh this method is probably much more immediately useful for helping one understand subtle differences between [models trained on] subtly different data subsets, vs a loftier goal of helping one find "the" best data mixture -- to anyone considering this method, please feel free to reach out :)

These days RAG systems have gotten popular for boosting LLMs—but they're brittle💔. Minor shifts in phrasing (✍️ style, politeness, typos) can wreck the pipeline. Even advanced components don’t fix the issue. Check out this extensive eval by @neelbhandari.bsky.social and @tianyucao.bsky.social!

📖For our last @MilaNLProc lab seminar, it was a pleasure to have @akhilayerukola.bsky.social presenting "Need for Culturally Contextual Safety Guardrails: A Case Study in Non-Verbal Gestures".

🚀 New #ICLR2025 Paper Alert! 🚀 Can Audio Foundation Models like Moshi and GPT-4o truly engage in natural conversations? 🗣️🔊 We benchmark their turn-taking abilities and uncover major gaps in conversational AI. 🧵👇 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2503.01174

Check out Akhila'S VERY cool work on culturally contextual hand gestures and how current systems (can't) handle them 🤖

My PhD student Akhila's been doing some incredible cultural work in the last few years! Check out out latest work on cultural safety and hand gestures, showing most vision and/or language AI systems are very cross-culturally unsafe!

Did you know? Gestures used to express universal concepts—like wishing for luck—vary DRAMATICALLY across cultures? 🤞means luck in US but deeply offensive in Vietnam 🚨 📣 We introduce MC-SIGNS, a test bed to evaluate how LLMs/VLMs/T2I handle such nonverbal behavior! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17710

Coding agents often don’t ask follow-up clarifying questions 🤷‍♀️ But interactivity isn’t about asking more questions—it’s about asking better questions! 🤖💬 Check out this new work led by Sanidhya Vijay! www.linkedin.com/in/sanidhya-...