happy to share our new paper, out now in Neuron! led by the incredible Yizhen Zhang, we explore how the brain segments continuous speech into word-forms and uses adaptive dynamics to code for relative time - www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

🌍Introducing BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data! LLMs learn from vastly more data than humans ever experience. BabyLM challenges this paradigm by focusing on developmentally plausible data We extend this effort to 45 new languages!

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs. They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior. #MLSky arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

PhD Position: Accented Speech Processing - Apply now! Come work with Mirjam Broersma, @davidpeeters.bsky.social, and me at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University in the Netherlands. Application deadline: 19 October 2025 For more information, see www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Huge congrats to the envisionBOX team for the Open Science award nomination! 🎉 My tutorial on speech analysis tools in Python from the Unboxing Multimodality summer school (github.com/mdhk/unboxin...) is now also available at envisionbox.org Thanks for the invitation & this great initiative! 👏

The 𝗜𝗟𝗖𝗕 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 in Marseille went beyond all my expectations! 💯 A week has already flown by since I had one of the most formative experiences of my PhD so far. 👩‍🎨

✨ Do self-supervised speech models learn to encode language-specific linguistic features from their training data, or only more language-general acoustic correlates? At #Interspeech2025 we presented our new Wav2Vec2-NL model and SSL-NL evaluation dataset to test this! 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00981 ⬇️

Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

What a privilege to have #CCN2025 in (an exceptionally warm and sunny) Amsterdam this year! It was my first time attending the conference, and being surrounded by so many talented researchers whose interests are similar to mine has been a deeply enriching experience ✨

Huge congrats to @maithevannoort.bsky.social on her very popular poster! 🎉 She is now also on bluesky (and looking for a PhD position 👀)

So exciting, #CCN2025 in Amsterdam started today! We have stroopwafels!! Catch me at my poster on Friday to chat about the role of context in neural representational alignment to spoken language systems (C34) 🙌

 🔗 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=K...

I’m in hall X5 at board 3! See you there 🙌

Next week I’ll be in Vienna for my first *ACL conference! 🇦🇹✨ I will present our new BLiMP-NL dataset for evaluating language models on Dutch syntactic minimal pairs and human acceptability judgments ⬇️ 🗓️ Tuesday, July 29th, 16:00-17:30, Hall X4 / X5 (Austria Center Vienna)

Excited to announce the first workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS 2025! 📣 How can we interpret the algorithms and representations underlying complex behavior in deep learning models? 🌐 coginterp.github.io/neurips2025/ 1/4

ICYMI githistory.xyz is a great way to navigate #git commits and visualise how a file has been changing across commits Just replace github.com with github.githistory.xyz in the URL and enjoy! #rstats

The @interspeech.bsky.social early registration deadline is coming up in a few days! Want to learn how to analyze the inner workings of speech processing models? 🔍 Check out the programme for our tutorial: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter... & sign up through the conference registration form!

I am excited to announce that my paper "On the reliability of feature attribution methods for speech classification" has been accepted to #Interspeech2025! Co-authors: @hmohebbi.bsky.social, Arianna Bisazza, Afra Alishahi, @grzegorz.chrupala.me Find the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.16406

Next we jump from analyzing text models to predictive speech models! Phoneticists have claimed for decades that humans rely more on contextual cues when processing vowels compared to consonants. Turns out so do speech models!

An important read (🎁), shared for all the reasons. This is fascism.

Na viraal optreden op Koningsdag is The Space Choir nu ook in Amsterdam: ‘Zullen we ’m een keer als hooligans zingen? Echt F-side wil ik horen’

New postdoc positions at the (DISI-affiliated) Center for Possible Minds at Indiana University. Looking for scholars interested in interdisciplinary research on the nature of biological, artificial, and collective intelligence. Please share widely! indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/29547

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

I'm very pleased to share our latest study: ‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’, by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al: - Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub... - Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa... - Thread below 👇

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

Interested in the evolution of human language and in understanding the pressures that shape languages today? Come do a PhD with me! Fully funded PhD position available in my group @mpi-nl.bsky.social, application deadline June 2nd: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

Can self-supervised models 🤖 understand allophony 🗣? Excited to share my new #NAACL2025 paper: Leveraging Allophony in Self-Supervised Speech Models for Atypical Pronunciation Assessment arxiv.org/abs/2502.07029 (1/n)

An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology openletter.earth/against-lang...

Don't miss today's episode with @mdhk.net as we discuss her work on AI and speech processing. She even brought in slides 🧠🗣️🤖🖼️ 12:00PM at Echobox Radio #Linguistics #CognitiveScience #ArtificialIntelligence #SpeechProcessing #AIResearch #UniversityofAmsterdam #NewEpisode #MarianneDeHeerKloots

New preprint! 🚨How do groups process information? What does it mean for part of a network to "explore" and part to "exploit"? How do we move beyond phenomenological correlation in our analyses of networks to a causal theory of collective intelligence? Here, we try to answer these questions:

✨New paper ✨ Introducing 🌍MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Minimal Pairs for Subject-Verb Agreement, covering 101 languages! We present over 125,000 minimal pairs and evaluate 17 LLMs, finding that support is still lacking for many languages. 🧵⬇️

🚨New in @science.org🚨 With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

The PhD call is out! Apply by 24 April here: www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

Ever wondered what harbor seal pups sound like? Well, you're in luck because I have a backlog of SO MANY seal videos and Bsky has declared we are now in business 😎 Excited to share lots of seal stuff and possibly some whale acoustics soon! 👀🦭🧪

New preprint! In arxiv.org/abs/2502.20349 “Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science: Towards generalizable models and theories that capture the full range of natural behavior” we synthesize AI & cognitive science works to a perspective on seeking generalizable understanding of cognition. Thread:

Review of applications starts March 1st! Apply here: disi.org/apply/

Come work with us! Our department is hiring an associate/assistant prof in language and speech technology www.ru.nl/en/working-a... #interspeech #speech #SpeechTech #SpeechScience

Dutch universities will go on strike! Against the 1.3 billion cuts! March 10: Leiden University March 11: Utrecht University March 13: University Nijmegen March 17: University of Amsterdam March 20: Maastricht University March 27: VU Amsterdam April 10: Tilburg University @woinactie.bsky.social

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.

Happy New Year everyone! Jim and I just put up our January 2025 release of Speech and Language Processing! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain: arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Sentences are partially understood before they're fully read. How do LMs incrementally interpret their inputs? In a new paper, @amuuueller.bsky.social and I use mech interp tools to study how LMs process structurally ambiguous sentences. We show LMs rely on both syntactic & spurious features! 1/10

If you see this, post a concert picture you took this year.

Why do diverse ANNs resemble brain representations? Check out our new paper with Colton Casto, @nogazs.bsky.social , Colin Conwell, Mark Richardson, & @evfedorenko.bsky.social on “Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks.” 🧠🤖 tinyurl.com/yckndmjt

📣 #SpeechTech & #SpeechScience people We are organizing a special session at #Interspeech2025 on: Interpretability in Audio & Speech Technology Check out the special session website: sites.google.com/view/intersp... Paper submission deadline 📆 12 February 2025

Transformer LMs get pretty far by acting like ngram models, so why do they learn syntax? A new paper by sunnytqin.bsky.social, me, and @dmelis.bsky.social illuminates grammar learning in a whirlwind tour of generalization, grokking, training dynamics, memorization, and random variation. #mlsky #nlp

🚨New preprint🚨 “Measuring Naturalistic Speech Comprehension in Real Time” ➡️ bit.ly/4iESDdV w/ @kriesjill.bsky.social, Shiven Gupta, & @lauragwilliams.bsky.social Do you use naturalistic listening paradigms, but wish you could record a continuous behavioral measure of comprehension? 🧵1/8

DISI folks, we've made a starter pack of alums and past faculty so it's easier to find everyone here. Enjoy! And do tell us if you'd like to be added! go.bsky.app/AyYDTHa