Thank you Gabriella!

But see for yourself! concreteness.eu

All the thanks to my collaborators @gabriellavigliocco.bsky.social and @thelablab.bsky.social and big shout-out to the excellent Stanford NLU online course (this project started as my final submission).

Another bonus: these ratings can be generated "in-context", because transformer word embeddings change depending on surrounding semantic information. (Think "I go to the bank to get money" vs "I walk on the sandbank" -> previous methods were not able to differentiate btw these)

The result surpasses SOTA and even the reliability of human raters (at least in English). Interestingly, we were able to extend ratings to other languages with a simple translation step (suggesting that there may be something universal about these ratings).

Why a multimodal transformer? We know that visual information is important for accurately rating concrete words. And because emotional information is important for accurately rating abstract words, we fine-tuned our model on a dataset of emotional image descriptions.

A multimodal transformer-based tool for automatic generation of concreteness ratings across languages - Communications Psychology This resource presents a tool to use multimodal transformers to generate reliable, context-sensitive concreteness ratings for single words and multi-word expressions across languages.

Our multimodal transformer tool for automating word-concreteness ratings is published today

📝 C-ratings are used in research across Cognitive Science
💶 They take time and money to collect
⚙️ Automation solves this + we get in-context ratings for free!

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

@emollick.bsky.social you might be interested in this paper of ours! It was a very nice collab across different orgs.

I should say I mean this in a positive way for you, big fan of your work.

I think the lesson here is that most likely what you are projecting onto someone is more telling of who you are than who that person is.

Breaking the barrier between theorists and experimentalists Many neuroscience students are steeped in an experiment-first style of thinking. Let’s not forget how theory can guide experiments.

Sam Gershman writes beautifully about how theory-free neuroscience prevents the field from reaching its promise. Beautiful and true. Most folks do not test hypotheses. Running a NHST does not a hypothesis make. www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes …

Most critiques of LLMs (e.g. @garymarcus.bsky.social) are ultimately about not wanting to accept that very dumb processes can lead to "intelligence". I think this paper offers a great perspective on how this could happen in both minds and machines. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

also that’s such an arrogant statement.

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes …

it’s not flawed www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I guess attention is all you need after all

…but true

I wish a smart mind like yours would not focus on the negative side for likes, but instead try to think about what we can do with the technology we have.

that’s personal and not to the point.

what are those other approaches and what impact have they had? I 100% appreciate the skepticism but it just works. No matter how many failures you quote it’s absolutely incredible we have a model as capable as today’s.

why always so negative, Gary?

I wish playing dead were an option when responding to reviewers.

The neurobiology of language does not operate in a vat. An important perspective from the @thelablab.bsky.social and colleagues: "Language is widely distributed throughout the brain" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Context is everything How the brain processes concepts is influenced by contextual information, such as what a person is seeing, suggests new study.

Context is everything: How context influences the way the brain processes concepts.

@hugospiers.bsky.social yes it really was a great review process, can only recommend.

thanks for your support 💪

VOR of this paper is out today in @elife.bsky.social.