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Reposted by Yevgeni Berzak

Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 7d

It's officially been 75 years since the proposal of the Turing Test, a good time bring up 'The Minimal Turing Test':

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · 28d

if any

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Aug 24

my friend/colleague Frank Jäkel wrote a book on AI. I sadly don't know German but I happily know Frank, and I've heard him talking about this for a while now, and just on that basis I'd recommend the German speakers in the audience check it out

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · Aug 20

We had a lot of fun delivering the Eye Tracking and NLP tutorial at ACL! The slides are available on the tutorial website acl2025-eyetracking-and-nlp.github.io

ACL 2025 Tutorial: Eye Tracking and NLP

ACL 2025 Tutorial on Eye Tracking and NLP

acl2025-eyetracking-and-nlp.github.io

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Orit Peleg @oritpeleg.bsky.social · Jun 25

Help us record firefly flashes! 👇🙏

George Musser @georgemusser.com · Jun 24

Do you have fireflies in your backyard? Biologist @oritpeleg.bsky.social is collecting data! #emergence docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Help us Record Firefly Flashes ✨

Firefly flashes are amazing ❤️ During mating season, fireflies gather in groups and flash their species-specific flash pattern. To better understand these communication signals, we developed a method ...

docs.google.com

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Jun 2

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot:

"Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"

(by Balaban & me)

relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · May 30

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

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Emily Morgan @emilynguist.bsky.social · May 30

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · May 29

Data and documentation: github.com/lacclab/OneS...

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exciting recent work with OneStop from our lab (more on this soon!!): github.com/lacclab/OneS...

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · May 29

👁️‍🗨️ 4 sub-corpora: 📖 reading for comprehension, 🔎📖 information seeking, 📖📖 repeated reading, 🔎📖📖 information seeking in repeated reading.

🏋🏽 Text difficulty level manipulation: reading original and simplified texts.

👌 High quality recordings with an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker.

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · May 29

👥 360 participants (English L1) & 152 hours of eye movement recordings - more data than all the publicly available English L1 eye tracking corpora combined!

🗞️ 30 newswire articles in English (162 paragraphs) with reading comprehension questions and auxiliary text annotations.

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · May 29

👀 📖 Big news! 📖 👀
Happy to announce the release of the OneStop Eye Movements dataset! 🎉 🎉
OneStop is the product of over 6 years of experimental design, data collection and data curation.
github.com/lacclab/OneS...

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Titus von der Malsburg @tmalsburg.bsky.social · May 22

New paper! We show that eye movements during normal reading (no extra task) are effective at predicting reading comprehension as measured by recall. Both early and late eye-movement measures are key. This research was led by the amazing Diane Mézière.

ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

<em>Reading Research Quarterly</em> | ILA Literacy Journal | Wiley Online Library

Recent research on the use of eye movements to predict performance on reading comprehension tasks suggests that while eye movements may be used to measure comprehension, the relationship between eye-...

ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Shravan Vasishth @shravanvasishth.bsky.social · May 22

In person (no streaming/zoom) sentence processing workshop at Potsdam with Tal Linzen, Brian Dillon, Titus von der Malsburg, Oezge Bakay, William Timkey, Pia Schoknecht, Michael Vrazitulis, and Johan Hennert:

vasishth.github.io/sentproc-wor...

Sentence processing workshop, May 27, 2025

vasishth.github.io

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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · May 20

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖

Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths?

Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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A schematic of our method. On the left are shown Bayesian inference (visualized using Bayes’ rule and a portrait of the Reverend Bayes) and neural networks (visualized as a weight matrix). Then, an arrow labeled “meta-learning” combines Bayesian inference and neural networks into a “prior-trained neural network”, described as a neural network that has the priors of a Bayesian model – visualized as the same portrait of Reverend Bayes but made out of numbers. Finally, an arrow labeled “learning” goes from the prior-trained neural network to two examples of what it can learn: formal languages (visualized with a finite-state automaton) and aspects of English syntax (visualized with a parse tree for the sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”).

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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · May 2

Made a new assignment for a class on Computational Psycholinguistics:
- I trained a Transformer language model on sentences sampled from a PCFG
- The students' task: Given the Transformer, try to infer the PCFG (w/ a leaderboard for who got closest)

Would recommend!

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On the left is a probabilistic context free grammar (PCFG). On the right is an image of the Transformer architecture. There are arrows going back and forth between the PCFG and the Transformer, showing how the assignment goes back and forth between them.

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Reposted by Yevgeni Berzak

Jennifer Hu @ COLM (recruiting PhDs and postdocs!) @jennhu.bsky.social · Mar 12

Check out our new work on introspection in LLMs! 🔍

TL;DR we find no evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own knowledge.

Beyond the study of LLM introspection, our findings inform an ongoing debate in linguistics research: prompting (eg grammaticality judgments) =/= prob measurement!

Siyuan Song✈️COLM @siyuansong.bsky.social · Mar 12

New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language?
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Mar 11

it's only Consciousness if it comes from the Consciousness region of the brain, otherwise its just sparkling attention

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Mar 6

new preprint on Theory of Mind in LLMs, a topic I know a lot of people care about (I care. I'm part of people):

"Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models"

(by Hu* @jennhu.bsky.social , Sosa, and me)

link: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.21098

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Guy Davidson @guydav.bsky.social · Feb 21

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence!

From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · Feb 13

Hello! I'm looking to hire a post-doc, to start this Summer or Fall.

It'd be great if you could share this widely with people you think might be interested.

More details on the position & how to apply: bit.ly/cocodev_post...

Official posting here: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14723

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Ev Fedorenko @evfedorenko.bsky.social · Feb 5

Our language neuroscience lab (evlab.mit.edu) is looking for a new lab manager/FT RA to start in the summer. Apply here: tinyurl.com/3r346k66 We'll start reviewing apps in early Mar. (Unfortunately, MIT does not sponsor visas for these positions, but OPT works.)

EvLab

Our research aims to understand how the language system works and how it fits into the broader landscape of the human mind and brain.

evlab.mit.edu

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · Feb 3

The 3rd Workshop on Eye Movements and the Assessment of Reading Comprehension will take place on June 5–7, 2025 at the University of Stuttgart!
Submit an abstract by March 1st and join us!
tmalsburg.github.io/Comprehensio...

The 3rd Workshop on Eye Movements and the Assessment of Reading ComprehensionJune 5–7, 2025, University of Stuttgart

tmalsburg.github.io

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Ev Fedorenko @evfedorenko.bsky.social · Jan 23

So excited to receive the Troland Award!! Huge congrats to the other winner—Nick Turk-Browne! And TY, as always, to my mentors&nominators, to my amazing labbies past&present, and to all the wonderful and supportive colleagues in our broader scientific community. <3 www.nasonline.org/award/trolan...

Troland Research Award – NAS

Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within ...

www.nasonline.org

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Yevgeni Berzak @whylikethis.bsky.social · Jan 23

Fantastic resource!

Brian Dillon @linguistbrian.bsky.social · Jan 23

Happy to share that Liz Schotter and I have just published a beginner-level tutorial introduction to eye-tracking-while-reading studies in Behavior Methods:

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

link.springer.com