I'm packing for NASSLLI 2025. The lineup is terrific! I'm looking forward to enjoying Seattle for the first time and climbing again with @shanest.bsky.social, who organized the school (kudos!). nasslli25.shane.st/schedule/

Just to be clear, we reached the arresting-judges-and-deporting-US-citizens-without-due-process stage of the slide into authoritarianism today. And the citizens in question included a toddler and a child with cancer who needs treatment in the US.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

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!

Almost certainly an anti-Semitic hate crime. And the President who is trying to tear up the American university system on the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism hasn't said a word.

I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe." But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment. 1/

In a formal press event, in the Oval Office, Trump replies to a reporter's question saying that, yes, he would send U.S. citizens to the Salvadoran prison.

Evil

When the head of ICE starts talking about how great it would be to have Amazon Prime for shipping human beings to a concentration camp in El Salvador that no one ever leaves, you’ve gone way past “it could never happen here.”

You can tell who the Good Guys are because they're the ones smashing a car window to drag a mother away from her child while wearing ski masks.

The lesson for universities is you may as well fight back. You'll lose the money either way. The only question is whether you keep your dignity.

EVERY time EVERYONE stand up to Trump, he caves Paging university presidents/chancellors

A basic red line for defending academic freedom would be not turning over faculty data because they signed an open letter.

It was a pleasure talking to the great @carlzimmer.com about a really exciting new paper from Mélissa Berthet and colleagues about possible non-trivial compositionality in Bonobos. Story in the quote below; paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Every single university president should be asked, in public, why they are not speaking out this way to support all the students currently detained without due process, and all those terrified that they will be next, on every campus in this country. Yes, including Columbia's acting president.

A lot of people like to dismiss racism as insubstantial to material realities but we’re watching a nation burn trillions of dollars in wealth to entrench a racial system of domination.

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

Yes, and they need to do it this week. And the week after. And the week after that. Loudly, collectively, publicly. The silence is deafening. And it's not working. Which everyone could have predicted, because it didn't work before when the attacks were coming from the state level.

What would you say if you saw it in another country? Happening right now

ICE is a terrorist organization.

"I don't care what the judges think" should be grounds for impeachment for any public official, but especially for key actors in the national security system.

This is going to be a bloodbath.

This isn't going to get the attention of Columbia, but it's at least as bad: the University of Maine is having its funding cut off because the governor of Maine dared to challenge Trump.

a democratic senator and members of the board at the university aided and abetted mahmoud khalil's arrest

Excited to announce that the (stellar!) program for NASSLLI is out now: nasslli25.shane.st Further details on registration and whatnot to follow in the coming weeks. Please do circulate to anyone you know who may be interested in attending!

if you went to college 1. what was your career goal when you started? 2. your initial major? 3. if you changed majors, what did you change to? 4. what do you do now, professionally? 1. No firm plan 2. No clue! Wanted to try it all 3. Phil, Math double (CS minor) 4. computational linguistics prof

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

Presenting at Amsterdam Colloquium this year! We analyze adjective order preferences across languages, replicating Futrell et al.'s findings for English and expanding the analysis to Russian. We also show these theories can predict adverb order.

Excited that the final version of our paper on filtered corpus training is out now in TACL! (Original thread is on the bad site, but the paper's title is a succinct summary.) doi.org/10.1162/tacl... Always a pleasure to work with Abhinav Patil and @jumelet.bsky.social , who deserve the real credit

Everyone should go read Jaap's thesis! And/or tune in to the live stream. In addition to the substance, there should be style too, i.e. Mondrian-themed slides

“Yeah so of course I tried it but then I remembered that I already HAVE wings.”

So my survey got attacked by some bots, and now I've lost 50% of my data. Please help me get to 1,000 real humans who actually meet my survey criteria? This sad PhD candidate thanks you in advance.

Humphrey Crogart walking the docks

i think the internet can be deadly for this sort of thing because it fills the idle space with other stuff. gotta put down the phone and walk around sometimes, or get in the shower

Urban Planning Opinion Progression xkcd.com/2832

Excited to announce the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. oecs.mit.edu What you need to know about the mind explained briefly and simply. Free globally. Available 2024. tinyurl.com/oecs-launch

If you have been an ACL member in the last 5 years, you can now respond to their official survey on the embargo policy.

Come and join my department! Penn Linguistics invites applications for a tenure-track position in Syntax at the rank of Assistant Professor. Follow the link for details. apply.interfolio.com/131974

Not quite what I'd like my first post on the sky site to be, but so it goes: #NLProc friends! I'm in need of a few emergency reviews for CoNLL (Lexical, Compositional, and Discourse Semantics track). Please reach out if you have some bandwidth right now!