Title page for the paper “A systematic framework for generating novel experimental hypotheses from language models”, with an epigraph from Jeff Elman describing how Rumelhart and McClelland (1982) did hypothesis generation with their connectionist network, and a figure describing our pipeline.

Announcing a new version of our 2024 paper on linguistic hypothesis generation from LMs!

@najoung.bsky.social and I have systematized our hypothesis generation framework, added stringent criteria for model selection, 10x-ed our learning trials, and included an epigraph from Jeff Elman 🙏!

Infinite thanks to @arianna-bis.bsky.social , @jumelet.bsky.social and @yevgenm.bsky.social

Best supervisors out there!!😍

We will soon publish the pre-print!

See you in Brazil! I’m really looking forward to discussing the results and possible extensions of this work with all of you.🤗

I’m very happy to share that my latest paper on the 𝐚𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠, tested on models trained under CDL data vs ADL data , has been accepted for an 𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 at the upcoming edition of 𝐂𝐨𝐠𝐒𝐜𝐢, which will take place at the end of July in Rio de Janeiro.💃

and the Polifonia project (lnkd.in/eaUyUBk), it examines how Generative AI can be used to augment the curation of structured data while addressing problems where standard approaches struggle with highly specialised humanities knowledge.

💬Description: The talk explores the intersection of semantic technologies and historical research within the context of initiatives like the Listening Experience Database (LED) (lnkd.in/efCzWwgQ)

📈Join us for the CDH Guest Lecture - Enrico Daga: Humanities Knowledge Graphs: opportunities and challenges with gen-AI

📅Date: March 4th, 2026
⏰Time: 11:00-12:30
🏫Location: Turft06 (Turftorenstraat, room 06)

The call is open!
All researchers in linguistics and related fields and research projects are welcome to join and submit an abstract.

Abstracts can be submitted through this link until March 16th 2026. For more information, check out the submission instructions on the TABU Dag website tabudag.nl

Are you based in Groningen and want to help us evaluate the Generative AI puzzle? 🍫

We are looking for participants of every age between 16 and 60 years old. 📊

Contact us and we will deliver the puzzle and cards to you in person :)

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) (Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues!

A thread 🧵

We can’t wait to welcome you, over the coming months we’ll be gradually revealing more information about the amazing keynote speakers who will be presenting at the Academiegebouw next summer 🤫. Stay tuned! 🤗

⁣
This year I’m part of the organizing team, and I’m incredibly excited to work on and plan this historic event for the linguistics community in Groningen and across Northern Europe.⁣

We are thrilled to officially announce the dates of the 46th edition of 𝗧𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗗𝗔𝗚! Save the date for 𝗧𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭𝟭–𝟭𝟮 💫⁣

📣 I'm hiring 📣
Post-doc position at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social as part of @rug.nl CIT Innovation Fun "A3i – Artificial Intelligence Innovation Identifier"

Full call is available here: lnkd.in/esdQ7YGD
📅 Application deadline: Jan. 15 2026

Natural Language Processing How do you build Large Language Models? How do humans experience Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in their daily lives? And how can we...

👀 Look what 🎅 has broght just before Christmas 🎁: a brand new Research Master in Natural Language Processing at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social @rug.nl

Program: www.rug.nl/masters/natu...

Applications (2026/2027) are open! Come and study with us (you will also learn why we have a 🐮 in our logo)

The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io

It was wonderful to continue our personal and professional exchange outside the walls of the department and with other colleagues! Thanks for stopping by :)

Then at our weekly @gronlp.bsky.social Reading Group she talked about “𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡?”, which is also part of an ongoing research project. 📊

Marianne presented her work on “𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬” at the monthly edition of the Linguistic Lunch I organize in our CLCG department.

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a fantastic friend and researcher, @mdhk.net , who came to visit us in Groningen for a couple of days from Amsterdam! 🎉

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨
@byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸

Keynotes by
@jennysaffran.bsky.social
@noranewcombe.bsky.social
@pyoudeyer.bsky.social

More info to follow #IASL26

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

Interested in developmentally plausible LMs, and the role of child-directed language data?

Come to our poster TODAY (Fr 7 Nov, 10.30-12.00) #EMNLP!

Thrilled to be heading to Suzhou with a big team of GroNLP'ers 🐮

Interested in Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource LMs? Don't miss our posters & talks #EMNLP2025!

...ii) a direct quality reward from a teacher model, and iii) a reward based on the log probabilities of a teacher model (and its dialogue continuations). While these rewards did not improve our models performance, two different DPO approaches did!

Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning) Francesca Padovani1∗ Bastian Bunzeck2∗ Manar Ali2 Omar Momen2 Arianna Bisazza1 Hendrik Buschmeier2 Sina Zarrieß2 1Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), University of Groningen 2CRC 1646 – Linguistic Creativity in Communication, Bielefeld University f.padovani@rug.nl bastian.bunzeck@uni-bielefeld.de

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or doubts :)
Every contribution is more than welcome! 🙏😍