How do Mandarin speakers interpret implausible sentences? In our new paper in Cognitive Science (w/ Meilin Zhan Roger Levy Jiayi Lu Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT), we model Mandarin speakers’ interpretation using a noisy-channel framework. Paper link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/co…. A thread 1/10

A quick bump for those in the back: PhD applications for #StanfordLinguistics are due *Nov 30*: linguistics.stanford.edu/degree-program…. Please RT!

👋I boost a lot of job opportunities on here and now it's time to boost my own! I'll be arriving at #Stanford in fall of 2024 and I'm looking for awesome people to help me figure out language. 🧵👇

Yi Ting Huang and I have an opening for a postdoctoral researcher on an NSF-funded project, 'Syntactic processing across socioeconomic status: Linking input to comprehension'. Apply by Nov 15; start Jul 1, 2024 with flexibility. Please disseminate widely! ejobs.umd.edu/postings/114101

Today we are open-sourcing SynJax which is a JAX library for efficient probabilistic modeling of structured objects (sequences, segmentations, alignments, trees...). It can compute everything you would expect from a probability distribution: argmax, samples, marginals, entropy...

Sihan's fascination with languages began in his Shenzhen high school choir, singing Mandarin, English, Albanian, and Latin songs. Now he's a PhD student in MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences dept studying the invisible pressures shaping language over time.
mitbcs.info/qsz

How do different kinds of context affect people’s interpretations of sentences? We (w/ Sarah Nathaniel, Rachel Ryskin Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT) investigated this question at tinyurl.com/effectOfContext, a paper published in Cognition. A thread 1/11

Lawyers, professors debate findings of MIT study on ‘legalese’ masslawyersweekly.com/2023/06/15/law…

Arthur Mensch, cofounder of French AI startup Mistral, asking Emmanuel Macron about EU-level regulation of AI.

Answers:
1. premature regulation would stifle innovation.
2. More investment in computing infrastructure. France has an advantage: low-emission nuclear energy.
3. 'We…

New paper in PNAS: “Even lawyers don’t like legalese.” With Frank Mollica and Ted Gibson, Language Lab MIT.

Article here: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website…

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) News story here:
news.mit.edu/2023/new-study…

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My 5-min TEDx talk is now online! I talk about large language models and how we can understand them better by leveraging cognitive neuroscience

youtube.com/watch?v=pDVBjz…

#LLMs #TEDxBoston #languageandthought #neuroAI