NRC vraagt zich af of wetenschappers hun werk blijven delen op twitter en vindt op twitter maar liefst 7 fervent twitterende wetenschappers die desgevraagd bevestigen nog…
Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. I rarely rave about tools (to each their own, etc.) but here I write about the Remarkable, an e-paper device that has changed my habits for the better in several ways: I’ve been reading more, taking more notes, writing more, and also doodling and sketching more. I would describe it as a distraction-free piece of technology with just the right affordances.
Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction: this enables a whole new form of monetization.
The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power. Or you can go meta and think critically about what it takes to make a point that is as compelling as this in both form and content. See, and I like that second move a lot more.
Been reading this paper by Damián Blasi, Jo Henrich, Lila Adamou, David Kemmerer and Asifa Majid and can recommend it…
A serendipitous wormhole into EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess…
Part of the struggle of writing in a non-native language is that it can be hard to intuit the strength…
Ten years ago, fresh out of my PhD, I completed three papers. One I submitted to a regular journal; it came out in 2012. One was for a special issue; it took until 2017 to appear. One was for an edited volume; the volume is yet to appear.
Too much going on at #acl2022nlp for live-tweeting, but I’ll do a wee thread on 3 papers I found thought-provoking:…
DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. A widely circulated PR animation features meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation and generation. This post jumps from reflections on techbros to the erasure of human labour in Cosmopolitan’s rushed “first AI magazine cover”.
📣New! From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology — very happy to see this…
Every once in a while I come across work that conflates iconicity and indexicality, or lumps them together under a…
Very happy to see this paper out! We combine comparative, lexical, historical, and psycholinguistic evidence for an in-depth look at a pervasive form of cross-modal iconicity.
📣New! Coordinating social action: A primer for the cross-species investigation of communicative repair. Very happy to present this work w/…
Always plot your data. We’re working with conversational corpora and looking at timing data. What do you do when distributions look off?
Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known as much for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area as for being a petty tyrant with a powerful grip on ‘his’ district. The map is obscure and hard to find, and I make available some digital versions here.
There is a considerable halo-effect attached to JIFs, whereby an article that ends up in a high IF journal (whether by sheer brilliance or simply knowing the right editor, or both) is treated, unread, with a level of veneration normally reserved for Wunderkinder. Usually this is done by people totally oblivious to network effects, gatekeeping and institutional biases.
Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen & Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit & kwantificatie.
A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.
📣New! “Interjections“, a contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Word Classes. One of its aims: rejuvenate work on interjections by…