Interested in how AI models can achieve flexible, robust, human-like reasoning? Me too! I am recruiting for a PhD position in neurosymbolic AI to investigate this question. If you are interested, please take a look here:
werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
Zou dit mechanisme onderdeel zijn van het mediawijsheid-onderwijs op Nederlandse scholen? Zou eigenlijk wel moeten, want je ziet voortdurend dat het publiek consequent onderschat hoe krachtig de 'selection bias' op social media is. De Charlies van deze wereld maken daar handig gebruik van.
By the time we had figured out how to do DOP properly, no-one cared about constituency parsing anymore.
aclanthology.org/D11-1008/
Ouch, that discussion was painful for many of us in Amsterdam. Goodman did great work, but the reputational damage also affected people that had nothing to do with that 'fortuitious choice' of parameters, including the original inventor of DOP, Remko Scha, Sima'an and many others.
My former student Michael Repplinger wrote a nice historical perspective on computational semantics: in 4 big steps from Montague Semantics to neural language models.
"Vector-space models of words and sentences" (2018)
www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/pdf/n...
📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling
(PLZ RT)
What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD!
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social
@mpi-nl.bsky.social
Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling
There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.
It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.
plot twist... what a mess!
Everything we expected in February 2023 holds true, I believe, except for the inexplicable passivity of science societies
"Science, similar to many other domains of society, now faces a reckoning induced by AI technology infringing on its most dearly held values"
bioethics.jhu.edu/wp-content/u...
Djeez, this is Gödel Escher Bach meets A New Kind of Science, and then on steroids. A paper that discusses the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the halting problem, evolution by natural selection, selforganisation in cellular automata and phyllotactic patterning in plants might be a bit too much for me...
This is a reminder that the meta-reviews are due TODAY 4 March AoE. Please remember that if you don't sumit your meta-reviews on time you might be considered highly irresponsible, which means your co-authored papers may be desk rejected and you may become ineligible from committing to *CL conferences or (re-)submitting any work on the the next ARR cycle.
I don't understand why the ACL/ARR organizers think this is an appropriate way to communicate with area chairs... The peer review system is collapsing, and the whole system of science as we know it requires a rethink. But let's be kind to eachother in the process and not forget what we are here for.
I agree on the problem, and on the limits of the kind of AI that dominates the headlines. But solar & wind energy thrive regardless, I am hopeful about the use of physics-informed predictive models --also AI-- for discovering new materials and industrial processes for cheap carbon capture.
Just spent two hours talking w/ 30 (likely left-leaning?) doctoral students about the opportunities and perils of AI. Marx was quoted; the phrase “zero-shot” was used; “stochastic parrot” was not. If this complex reality isn’t visible in thinkpieces / social media, we need to make it visible.+
I need one too!
Without guarantees for faithfulness, the generation of explanations is often mere theater ("explainwashing"), but demonstrating faithfulness of explanation methods is hard. In our 2023 paper, @jumelet.bsky.social and I made a herculean attempt to develop a framework for this
arxiv.org/abs/2310.14840
With all the talk about "the blackbox problem" and "the right to explanation", I continue to be suprised by how little attention there is to what I have started calling *the faithfulness problem*: the problem of ensuring that generated explanations are faithful to the underlying causal mechanism.
Much work to do, indeed. And, unfortunately, even the model's explanations for the model's behavior cannot be trusted.
E.g., openreview.net/forum?id=4ub...
Zij "hecht aan land, landschap, taal, een historisch gegroeide gemeenschap". Code-taal voor wensen die men liever niet expliciet opschrijft?
I agree that would be desirable. I'm not involved, but found
this iCal link: calendar.google.com/calendar/ica...
Interessant! Is er consensus dat landbouwgiffen hiermee worden vrij gepleit? De opvallende uitzonderingen -- Zeeland, kop Noord-Holland, tip van Friesland -- zijn precies de gebieden met veel brak grondwater, waardoor boeren vast anders besproeien. Ben benieuwd of dat een factor kan zijn.
Bookmarked - looks very interesting! Is there a connection to the "evolution of modularity" literature from +-20 years ago?
Here's NLP1 from the master of AI in Amsterdam, with lots of materials:
cl-illc.github.io/nlp1-2025/sy...
14th century painting of St. Margaret of Antioch attacking a devil woman in a virid dress hitting a demon with a hammer
Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over
"When a single company can implement a rights-respecting, consent-based access regime at scale, it’s worth asking why public institutions have failed to do the same."
Everyone replies to the "AI" part of you message, but the problem is with "place": Bsky is not one place, but what you make if it. In my experience, you need to follow lots of people on Bsky to have enough interesting posts, but also unfollow those who keep posting on topics I don't find enjoyable.
Big news! 🗞️ I defended my PhD thesis "From Insights to Impact: Actionable Interpretability for Neural Machine Translation" @rug.nl @gronlp.bsky.social
I'm grateful to my advisors @arianna-bis.bsky.social @malvinanissim.bsky.social and to everyone who played a role in this journey! 🎉 #PhDone
It's quite amazing how oblivious the people in charge of these services seem to be of the very real concerns people have with being force-fed AI services everywhere.
The fact that LLM-probabilities mix P(m) and P(g), doesn't justify the practice of posthoc correcting these probabilities with information that humans don't have available. I think it simply means that the search for a more adequate model of grammaticality judgments is still open.
I agree, of course, with your warning about P(m) being a confound, and your 3 predictions (which should be uncontroversial). But that doesn't take away the fact that humans do have strong grammaticality judgments for sentences in isolation, which should not be compared with LLM-judgments on pairs.
Nice! You might be interested in our BLIMP-NL paper, which also reports correlations of SLOR + other metrics with human acceptability judgments, for another language: Dutch. In it, we're also critical of the apples-and-oranges comparison that Leivada et al complain about
bsky.app/profile/wzui...