New theoretical paper: “Beyond concreteness: why word specificity is the missing piece in theories on embodied language comprehension” shorturl.at/6Rv3Y Included in the special issue "Rethinking the Embodiment of Language: Challenges and Future Horizons", led by V. Cuccio, V. Gallese & Y. Shtyrov.

📣 Abstraction seminars are back! 🗓️ 12 December, 10:30 (CET) 🎙️Prof.ssa Kristina S. Despot 🎓Metaphor literalization strategy: From concrete to abstract and back to concrete again 📍 Bologna 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/B4H7R) 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨@abstractionerc.bsky.social

🌐 Il seminario della collega Valentina Cuccio è ora online! È disponibile sul sito di Abstraction al link: site.unibo.it/abstraction/... Se vi siete persi l’incontro o volete riascoltarlo con calma, potete trovarlo lì. Buona visione! 🎧✨

In the Netherlands, when you walk into a pharmacy with a prescription, a pharmacist takes your medication and then, every single time, hands both the prescription and the medicine to a second pharmacist for a congruence check before you pay. Peer review all the way down. I find it brilliant!

E oggi ho condiviso con il centro interdipartimentale Alma AI e un gruppo di colleghe e colleghi giuristi capitanati da Monica Palmirani i risultati a grandi linee del gruppo @abstractionerc.bsky.social su studi che coinvolgono l'uso di LLMs. Questa settimana è decisamente densa :-)

Seeing this slide after completing my postdoc at @abstractionerc.bsky.social makes me emotional. Great talk of @mariannabolog.bsky.social at the workshop "Large and Small Language Models: stato dell’arte fra limiti e prospettive" at Unibo. Many works about abstraction and LLM are on the horizon! :)

Dopo il seminario di Valentina Cuccio con una delegazionedi Abstraction, nel magnifico chiostro del dipartimento di storia, San Giovanni in Monte, Bologna.

Prof. Valentina Cuccio kicks off her seminar asking whether there are any cross-cutting, neglected dimensions that can explain the concreteness effect. She elaborates on the modality of acquisition of concepts @abstractionerc.bsky.social

Tavola rotonda all' ISTI-DAY, un'opportunità per discutere dei rischi, responsabilità e opportunità legate all'uso di GenAI per la ricerca.

Tomorrow I’m ready to hop on a train to Pisa right after my class, to take part in the round table at CNR ISTI, with top-notch computer scientists, to talk about the use and abuse of AI in research. I’ll be contributing the perspective of the humanities. Stay tuned! www.isti.cnr.it/it/ricerca/i...

Per chi fosse interessato a leggere cosa fa il gruppo ABSTRACTION @erc.europa.eu , ecco il flipbook interattivo con gli studi condotti fino ad oggi (in lingua italiana). heyzine.com/flip-book/61... Il flipbook accompagna un video introduttivo, che trovate qui: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIqc...

📣 November's Abstraction seminar is all set too! 🗓️ 19 November, 11:30 - 12.30 (CEST) 📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/xW7mF ) 🎆 Join us, details in the figure! 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨ @abstractionerc.bsky.social

Today I officially took up my new position as Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna @unibo.it 🎉 Funny to think it all began when I was a kid, convinced everyone thought in Italian (of course!) and the others just had to translate into whatever language they spoke 😅.

Time flies! 🚀 @grambelli.bsky.social just wrapped up her 3-year postdoc with Abstraction_ERC and is already off exploring new research frontiers. Grateful that some projects still keep us collaborating: once an Abstractioner, always an Abstractioner! ☕✨Thanks for the amazing mug!!!

I primi 2 seminari autunnali di @abstractionerc.bsky.social sono online!🥳 share.google/gGvHTdAA9O07... 👉Filippo Domaneschi 🎤Titolo: Concretely offensive: the processing f reclaimed slurs. 👉Veronica Repetti, 🎤Titolo: Concrete or abstract possession? Animacy, alienability, and syntactic structure.

Love this visual device: parents's discussions are shown not through words, only symbols, mostly pointing fingers. From the child’s view, the words don’t matter; it’s adult stuff. What he perceives is the tone, the tension, the conflict. A brilliant way to show how kids experience adult language.

Invited keynote at Rende, University of Calabria, went great! On the role of context and abstraction mechanisms in the construction and interpretation of multimodal metaphors

Excited to kick off day 1 of the CIRM International Annual Conference on Metaphor and Multimodality at the University of Calabria in Rende: such a beautiful campus nestled in the hills. Enjoyed a lovely morning walk to get here! My invited keynote is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

In the seminar room this morning, there was this (rather distracting) writing on the wall: “Piume al vento” (“Feathers in the Wind"). 🦩 Quite exotic and mysterious, indeed 🙃

Veronica Repetti explaining variation in animacy, alienability and syntactic structure of concrete and abstract possession, this morning for the second @abstractionerc.bsky.social seminar. All seminars are recorded and posted on site.unibo.it/abstraction/...

Filippo Domaneschi, director of the Lab of Language and Cognition presenting at @abstractionerc.bsky.social on the reclamation of slurs, discussing pragmatic and psycholinguistic aspects in relation to abstraction mechanisms

📣 November's Abstraction seminar is all set too! 🗓️ 19 November, 11:30 - 12.30 (CEST) 📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/xW7mF ) 🎆 Join us, details in the figure! 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨ @abstractionerc.bsky.social

I knew I hired well for @abstractionerc.bsky.social from day 1. But seeing @tomlamarra.bsky.social presenting this morning his phd progress in front of faculty and this evening to the city, taking part to phd storytelling (part of EU Researchers' night) was a clear confirmation. Brilliant, Tom!

Excited to share that @abstractionerc.bsky.social has even reached #CambridgeUniversity and #TrinityCollege! Yesterday, at the #XPrag2025 conference, I presented how speakers maximize the informativeness of their descriptions in naturalistic conversations. Thanks for the insightful discussions!

Glad to be at #XPrag2025 at the #UniversityOfCambridge! Day 1 was packed with fascinating talks and exciting discussions!

📣The chapter "𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀" w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social is now online & forthcoming in the #ElsevierEncyclopedia of Language & Linguistics 🔍 Theoretical overview, quantification tools, and behavioral evidence on specificity. 👉 Read: urly.it/31c4nm @abstractionerc.bsky.social

📣 Abstraction seminars are back! 🗓️ 17 October, 10:00 (CEST) 📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/RjrOU) 🎆 Join us for another seminar, details in the figure! 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨ @abstractionerc.bsky.social

Apparently I searched multiple times for our consensus paper using this string: "what do we mean when we say Reilly" 😅 @reilly-coglab.com

Prof Kristina Despot from the Institute of Croatian Language visiting the @abstractionerc.bsky.social group to establish collaborations on th use of figurative language and abstraction mechanims, and to brainstorm a fantastic ERC proposal :-)

Excited to share that I contributed to an article just published in #Nature. My role was on the cognitive side, as part of a collaboration evolved from a fantastic #Dagstuhl seminar. Collective works like these are crucial windows into where our communities are going! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

📣 Abstraction seminars are back! 🗓️ 16 October, 15:00 (CEST) 📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/0fw5a) 🎆 Join us for a thought-provoking seminar, details in the figure! 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨ @abstractionerc.bsky.social

📣 Abstraction seminars are back! 🗓️ 16 October, 15:00 (CEST) 📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/0fw5a) 🎆 Join us for a thought-provoking seminar, details in the figure! 👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨ @abstractionerc.bsky.social

Thrilled to see our research featured on PsyPost 🚀 Trump vs. Harris, 2024 debate: sharp contrasts and surprising overlaps 👉 www.psypost.org/study-finds-...

New Paper Alert 🚨🆕 "Specificity Effect in Concrete/Abstract Semantic Categorization Tasks" doi.org/10.1007/s103... We observed faster response times for specific words compared to general words in a semantic decision task, regardless of their level of concreteness.

Arrived back home in Bologna and found a nice poscard by @adeleloia.bsky.social and @caterinavillani.bsky.social from San Francisco (#cogsci-2025) 🥰 Apparenly Lombard street' iconic stairs evoked #wordladders and language-mediated abstraction :-)

So, on the airplane i startes to watch "The White Lotus" (HBO) and the first minutes the resort manager explains to a trainee how to behave with the guests: "you don't wanna be too specific as a... as a presence, as an identity. You wanna be more generic." Abstraction terminology all the way down 🤪

Kudos to you Giulia!

Great accomplishment for your visiting period at #gronlp funded by @abstractionerc.bsky.social ! Congrats @grambelli.bsky.social ! Well deserved :-)

Abstractions all the way down. This is an amazing study! Congrats to @tommasoc80.bsky.social @grambelli.bsky.social and @piasommerauer.bsky.social

✈️ Off to Bordeaux for #SLE2025! On Friday I’ll present “How Analogy Drives Language Comprehension: The Case of Novel Compounds Interpretation” (a study on humans and LLMs) at the workshop Towards a better understanding of #analogy. Excited for talks, discussions & some Bordeaux-buzz 🍷

Last year, when I came to Denver for our summer holiday, I asked @TatteredCover bookshop at Stanley Marketplace if I could put up a flyer for the @abstractionerc.bsky.social app Word Ladders. Today I saw it’s still there on the door! 💜 Feeling happy, grateful, and proud!

Hard to watch a major newspaper still fumbling the Ukrainian President’s name: Zalensky.y, Zelenskyy, Zelenskky… Pick one and stick to it. So embarrassing, @theguardian.com.

@aclmeeting.bsky.social #acl2025 conference theme this year is GENERALIZATIONS in NLP models. Can models generalize, when the content of their concepts differs from that of humans? Check poster sess. 2: "How Humans and LLMs Organize Conceptual Knowledge: Exploring Subordinate Categories in Italian"

"Most papers are like 'look what i can have LLMs do' but it is LLM popcorn. It remains unclear why they do what they do. We need a LLM theory". Eduard Hovy's thought provoking talk at panel on Generalizations here at @aclmeeting.bsky.social is compelling (and long overdue!) 👏👏👏

Verena Rieser @aclmeeting.bsky.social 2025 in Vienna, keynote on day 2. We need human/AI alignment, but whats the gold standard we aim at? Which humans? Moreover, human demographic data can be misleading and ambiguous (check example in the picture :-))

Getting ready for #COGSCI2025 in San Francisco! 📆 July 31st, 02:37pm I’ll present a longitudinal study (w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social & @adeleloia.bsky.social) on how school-aged children build taxonomies using the #WordLadders task developed by @abstractionerc.bsky.social Catch up with us there!

Now @melaniemitchell.bsky.social talking about analogy making in humans and AI ! Room 1.34 #ACL2025 @aclmeeting.bsky.social

First session is ending, and it is amazing the different approaches, theories, topics proposed by the authors. Have a quick cup of ☕️ and join us for our keynote speaker @KatiaShutova talking about metaphors, politics & humor. #analogy #ACL2025 @piasommerauer.bsky.social @mariannabolog.bsky.social

Analogy-angle II just started in room 1.34 at #ACL2025. If you're interest in analogy, pass by! #NLProc @aclmeeting.bsky.social Filip Ilievski @piasommerauer.bsky.social @mariannabolog.bsky.social Ute Schmid