“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.
Ed is the way better alternative!! edstem.org
Wow, looks amazing Dallas!! Congrats!
I was just watching this video earlier today which makes a really similar point (youtu.be/SKTsNV41DYg?...). At the end of the day the buck has to stop with a human, and for researchers we have to stand behind our work. Doing so using AI code tools might be (much?) more work than just coding it!
This major release of my lab's annotation tool, Potato 2.0, was a long time in the making but I'm really excited by all the new features (and quality of life improvements). If you're doing data annotation of any kind, check it out. Need any other features? We'd love to hear from you too!
The second new class I'm teaching is a very experimental graduate level seminar in CSE: "Building Small Language Models". I taught the grad level NLP class last semester (so fun!) but students wanted more—which of these new ideas work, and which work for SLMs? jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/CSE598-004/
After a multi-year effort led by my brilliant PhD advisee Ruth Bagley, this exciting work documenting large-scale racial disparities in media representations of gun violence is out today in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Very excited this work is out, many great chapters including a version of the fantastic MA thesis work of my former student Michael Senko (msenko1.github.io)!
Book cover of the collection entitled 'Battlefield Linguistics: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Interventions in Linguistics and Discursive Change', edited by Scott Burnett and Francesca Vigo.
💪 Congratulations to @burscott.bsky.social and Francesca Vigo on the publication of their impressive collection!
👉 Details here: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111351568/html#overview
@montreallx.bsky.social @kleonichka.bsky.social @helensauntson.bsky.social @robvoigt.bsky.social
For everyone working on the intersections between linguistic and computational research, consider submitting to the upcoming SCiL! We're very excited that it will be co-located with ACL 2026 as a workshop, and we've also received NSF funding to help cover costs.
sites.google.com/view/scil2026
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? 🧵👇
Tenure-track phonology position at UChicago!
UC Davis is looking to appoint a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07293
Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...
congrats - this looks really exciting and powerful Michael, looking forward to reading it!!
Four papers accepted at the #EMNLP2025 main conference!
1️⃣ Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?
2️⃣ Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models
In these two papers, we look into...
woohoo congrats!!
UMich Ling is hiring for a cluster hire position in AI and Linguistics! Come work in a fabulous department with great grad students, supportive colleagues, and one overly school-spirited nut who will tell you where all the fun stuff is on campus.
apply.interfolio.com/171006
I just gave a virtual presentation at ACL 2025 on our work about the production–interpretation asymmetry in reference processing in LLMs. If you’re into computational psycholinguistics or the LLMs x cognitive science space, give it a read!
aclanthology.org/2025.acl-sho...
@robvoigt.bsky.social
I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
wow this looks super cool!! excited to check it out.
congrats!!!
This statement from the NSF is insane.
Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.
Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.
The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.
🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)
Below a thread summary 🧵1/n
#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy
Cory Booker has taken the Senate floor and plans to filibuster as long as he’s physically able to protest the complete disregard for the rule of law by Trump and Musk.
Watch here: www.c-span.org/event/us-sen...
We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now
The Shame of Columbia: violating academic freedom
“Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.”
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...
Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.
The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.
