All I could think about when I saw the high school paper track:

Gotta start them young!

That's because the anti-test campaign is led by people who hated the tests because they were bad at math, not by people who are trying to promote equality

It turns out the data bottleneck problem is more dire than initially thought:

AI model performance - which can be largely attributed to the presence of test concepts within their vast pretraining datasets - increases linearly with exponentially more data.

RIP: Scaling laws

The fire alarm in my apartment building spontaneously combusted last night and filled the whole building with smoke. As I stood in my bathrobe watching the fire brigade, I resolved to be kinder to myself about my own mistakes.

If this were a science paper, you would expect a country that picks its science workforce at random as a “weak baseline” and a leading nation like the US to actively experiment towards state-of-the-art, or at least beat the baseline.

Not providing a guaranteed path for…

Welcome to the new era of AI: 'Deep' was once the buzzword at AI conferences, but it's no longer the case in COLM.

smh the wokes have destroyed another institutional tradition
nytimes.com/2024/03/27/art…

Conversations about #AI fairness and AI assistive technology need to include disabled people… #KempnerInstitute Research Fellow Naomi Saphra discusses fairness and disability in this important new article from the Harvard Gazette.
bit.ly/4aijrfB

.Gary Marcus is joined by Dr Naomi Saphra, Bob Mankoff, and Yejin Choi to discuss if new large language models can make us laugh.

Listen to season 4 episode 4 of our podcast for more.

aventine.org/podcast

Coming soon to NAACL near you (if you are in Mexico City) openreview.net/forum?id=qkbqR…

Year-end review, pick for Best Paper of 2023:

“First Tragedy, then Parse: History Repeats Itself in the New Era of Large Language Models”
Naomi Saphra, Eve Fleisig, Kyunghyun Cho, Adam Lopez

This happens in the tech industry, just about every 20 years.

blog.derwen.ai/best-paper-202…

Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs

Simone Balloccu, Patrícia Schmidtová, Mateusz Lango, Ondrej Dusek

aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long…

Best Non-publicized Paper Award #eacl2024

Sometimes I get extremely pleased with a visualization and just want to show it off. This fig showing that vowel-like consonants interact more with nearby acoustic features than other consonants is definitely one of those visualizations, and we have lots of findings like it.