All elementary functions from a single binary operator
He shows that a single binary operator,
eml(x, y) = exp(x) − ln(y),
together with the constant 1, generates the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.218...
@commonnotions.bsky.social presents:
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The lemon example may also be a case of syntactic misattachment:
[more peel][-ed] v. [more [peel -ed]]
Unlike with PPs though, high past participle attachment is syntactically invalid.
We may construct a benchmark for this sometime this year, ambiguous attachment cases would be fun to include!
Perhaps it's due to lack of syntactic knowledge! Looks like PP-misattachment of the PP (a valid parse, but not pragmatic).
Candace Ross found another syntactic misparse example in MLLM-CompBench (Kil/Mai et al 2024, proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...)
Thanks to @bayesianboy.bsky.social, Anya and everyone at Princeton Natural & Artificial Minds for the invitation!
Nice! What a fun extension of the classic analogies eval methodology! Do you also get the original phoneme back out? In the word embeddings case, one often gets 'man' is to 'king' as 'woman' is to 'king' again. For ypur phonological example, it would be something like [p] is to [t] as [b] is to [t].
Congrats Kyle!
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Scientists should listen to the emotional nature of such posts. Scientists are being led to a mode of expression more familiar to artists because something unprecedented is happening to science. It's notable to deviate from our familiar modes of thinking and argumentation. We should listen.
But this conversation about AI and impacts on livelihoods and meaning isn't at all new, it's just new to scientists. A few years ago, artists started to write heartfelt messages (my fav below) about AI and their work. Now teachers, coders, and scientists are too.
It's interesting to me how much discussion this is sparking! Simulatenously thought, I'm disturbed so many of our number are ready to entertain an obviously deeply false dichotomy at the heart of this discussion: that society must choose between having science and having a cure for cancer.
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This is super cool! I had been contemplating starting a project like this a few years ago to actualize a vague interest I have in the math of knots... but this benchmark is probably much better than I could've managed. Can't wait to take a closer look 🪢!
We've create a simple and easy framework for documenting AI evaluation methods! Check it out and submit some for your own datasets with a PR!
You can learn more here: github.com/facebookrese...
And here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.04062
My spouse is doing a week of science communication (in German) this week.
Topics may include cognitive science, linguistics, AI, political economy, science and technology studies, maybe even some philosophy too.
Check it out👨🔬!
Yes! Social accountability seems to have been a major part of the process...if you get a ping telling you you're late from an (S)AC you know, you're much more likely to feel embarassed, drop everything, and do what you agreed to do...the fields growing pangs are a challenge for sure!
I did once (arxiv.org/pdf/2311.18567) if you count this as compling paper (and not NLP). I know my coauthor Ryan has continued thinking about Judea Pearl style causality more afterwards too probably.
Like gen1 may just be comitative. Which also had me doubting whether he1 really corresponds to 'and' either... but i suspect Haspelmath has tests or at least refs to some in that link.
I stared trying to construct an argument that maybe mandarin differentiates NP (he2) and DP (gen1) conjunction. Then I tried to think about basic coordination of mandarin VPs (may only be periphrastic)... so perhaps this is a next reasonable place to point you to instead:
wals.info/chapter/64
Top: A syntax tree for the sentence "the doctor by the lawyer saw the artist". Bottom: A continuous vector.
🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026!
If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!
PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Screenshot of a figure with two panels, labeled (a) and (b). The caption reads: "Figure 1: (a) Illustration of messages (left) and strings (right) in toy domain. Blue = grammatical strings. Red = ungrammatical strings. (b) Surprisal (negative log probability) assigned to toy strings by GPT-2."
New work to appear @ TACL!
Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar.
Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings.
How can both things be true? 🧵👇
Nice! Might this shed some light on unnatural language processing effects? Thinking of older work I was doing with @koustuvsinha.com. We found examples where word reordering causing ungrammaticality could improve classifier results, and much discussion followed. Could be fun to think these together!
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Please RT for reach :)
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!
Asst or Assoc.
We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)
faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793
🤘
We wrote a thing about AI, fascism, and why framing this as "hype" is too apolitical
www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...
I agree this thread's headline claim seems premature. Let me add our recent ACL Findings paper, with Dexter Ju and @hagenblix.bsky.social, which found syntactic simplification in at least some LMs, in a novel domain regeneration setting: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...
Our team is hiring a postdoc in (mechanistic) interpretability! The ideal candidate will have research experience in interpretability for text and/or image generation models and be excited about open science!
Please consider applying or sharing with colleagues: metacareers.com/jobs/2223953961352324
