📣 November's Abstraction seminar is all set too!
🗓️ 19 November, 11:30 - 12.30 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/xW7mF )
🎆 Join us, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social

I knew I hired well for @abstractionerc.bsky.social from day 1.
But seeing @tomlamarra.bsky.social presenting this morning his phd progress in front of faculty and this evening to the city, taking part to phd storytelling (part of EU Researchers' night) was a clear confirmation. Brilliant, Tom!

Excited to share that @abstractionerc.bsky.social has even reached #CambridgeUniversity and #TrinityCollege!

Yesterday, at the #XPrag2025 conference, I presented how speakers maximize the informativeness of their descriptions in naturalistic conversations.

Thanks for the insightful discussions!

Glad to be at #XPrag2025 at the #UniversityOfCambridge!
Day 1 was packed with fascinating talks and exciting discussions!

📣The chapter "𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀"
w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social is now online & forthcoming in the #ElsevierEncyclopedia of Language & Linguistics
🔍 Theoretical overview, quantification tools, and behavioral evidence on specificity.
👉 Read: urly.it/31c4nm
@abstractionerc.bsky.social

📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 17 October, 10:00 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/RjrOU)
🎆 Join us for another seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social

Indeed our paper is doing great!!! I am not an expert in Australian top models, I admit, I prefer cognitive scientists from the USA overall :-)

Apparently I searched multiple times for our consensus paper using this string: "what do we mean when we say Reilly" 😅
@reilly-coglab.com

Prof Kristina Despot from the Institute of Croatian Language visiting the @abstractionerc.bsky.social group to establish collaborations on th use of figurative language and abstraction mechanims, and to brainstorm a fantastic ERC proposal :-)

Excited to share that I contributed to an article just published in #Nature. My role was on the cognitive side, as part of a collaboration evolved from a fantastic #Dagstuhl seminar.
Collective works like these are crucial windows into where our communities are going!
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 16 October, 15:00 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/0fw5a)
🎆 Join us for a thought-provoking seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social

📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 16 October, 15:00 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/0fw5a)
🎆 Join us for a thought-provoking seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social

Thrilled to see our research featured on PsyPost 🚀
Trump vs. Harris, 2024 debate: sharp contrasts and surprising overlaps 👉 www.psypost.org/study-finds-...

New Paper Alert 🚨🆕
"Specificity Effect in Concrete/Abstract Semantic Categorization Tasks"

doi.org/10.1007/s103...

We observed faster response times for specific words compared to general words in a semantic decision task, regardless of their level of concreteness.

Arrived back home in Bologna and found a nice poscard by @adeleloia.bsky.social and @caterinavillani.bsky.social from San Francisco (#cogsci-2025) 🥰
Apparenly Lombard street' iconic stairs evoked #wordladders and language-mediated abstraction :-)

So, on the airplane i startes to watch "The White Lotus" (HBO) and the first minutes the resort manager explains to a trainee how to behave with the guests: "you don't wanna be too specific as a... as a presence, as an identity. You wanna be more generic."
Abstraction terminology all the way down 🤪

Kudos to you Giulia!

Great accomplishment for your visiting period at #gronlp funded by @abstractionerc.bsky.social ! Congrats @grambelli.bsky.social ! Well deserved :-)

Abstractions all the way down. This is an amazing study! Congrats to @tommasoc80.bsky.social @grambelli.bsky.social and @piasommerauer.bsky.social

✈️ Off to Bordeaux for #SLE2025!
On Friday I’ll present “How Analogy Drives Language Comprehension: The Case of Novel Compounds Interpretation” (a study on humans and LLMs) at the workshop Towards a better understanding of #analogy.

Excited for talks, discussions & some Bordeaux-buzz 🍷

Last year, when I came to Denver for our summer holiday, I asked @TatteredCover bookshop at Stanley Marketplace if I could put up a flyer for the @abstractionerc.bsky.social app Word Ladders.
Today I saw it’s still there on the door! 💜 Feeling happy, grateful, and proud!

Hard to watch a major newspaper still fumbling the Ukrainian President’s name: Zalensky.y, Zelenskyy, Zelenskky…
Pick one and stick to it. So embarrassing, @theguardian.com.

@aclmeeting.bsky.social #acl2025 conference theme this year is GENERALIZATIONS in NLP models.
Can models generalize, when the content of their concepts differs from that of humans?
Check poster sess. 2: "How Humans and LLMs Organize Conceptual Knowledge: Exploring Subordinate Categories in Italian"

"Most papers are like 'look what i can have LLMs do' but it is LLM popcorn. It remains unclear why they do what they do. We need a LLM theory". Eduard Hovy's thought provoking talk at panel on Generalizations here at @aclmeeting.bsky.social is compelling (and long overdue!) 👏👏👏