Tried in class to roll with the metaphor of RNNs as a mixing bowl, ingredients becoming less distinct as you add more, but proceeded to torture the metaphor until I was explaining biRNNs as a sort of aggregation over alternate worlds of ingredient order.. like actually forget I said any of this

I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students! Come work with me on all things multilingual and low-resource NLP! NLP background welcome, but commitment to scientific study of language is essential. My recent work has included ASR for field linguistics and compact LLMs for heritage languages

Congratulations to @mginn.bsky.social, @covetedfish.bsky.social, Ali Marashian, @mvalentini.bsky.social, @alexispalmer.bsky.social & friends for receiving an Outstanding Paper award at #ACL2026 for the paper "Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing". aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...

Massively Multilingual Joint Segmentation and Glossing

Michael Ginn, Lindia Tjuatja, Enora Rice, Ali Marashian, Maria Valentini, Jasmine Xu, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguist...

aclanthology.org

I wanted to see which locally-runnable models are most effective for cultural heritage languages, this page has comparisons of 7 languages: mimno.github.io/PhiloBench/ llama3.1 and mistral are both powerful and fast!

After the enthusiasm of the shared task last year, we are running another shared task to create a community-made, culturally relevant multilingual benchmark! The deadline to contribute is August 1 AoE. See more details below.

📢 Call for Papers: 6th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest, Hungary! Join us and submit your works relating to multilingual NLP Speakers to be announced, so stay tuned! 👀 More info in the CFP: 🔗 sigtyp.github.io/ws2026-mrl.html

More students to brag about: congrats to @beichengbei.bsky.social, @hannahchun8011.bsky.social, and @cguo3.bsky.social, who had their Deep Learning term paper accepted to the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative! arxiv.org/abs/2604.10786

Do BERT Embeddings Encode Narrative Dimensions? A Token-Level Probing Analysis of Time, Space, Causality, and Character in Fiction

Narrative understanding requires multidimensional semantic structures. This study investigates whether BERT embeddings encode dimensions of fictional narrative semantics -- time, space, causality, and...

arxiv.org

Congratulations to @feiyuehchen.bsky.social and Lateef Adeleke who successfully converted their term paper on feature-level ASR evaluation into a publication to appear at the AfricaNLP workshop at EACL next month! pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2602.04716

Linguistically Informed Evaluation of Multilingual ASR for African Languages

Word Error Rate (WER) mischaracterizes ASR models' performance for African languages by combining phonological, tone, and other linguistic errors into a single lexical error. By contrast, Feature Erro...

arxiv.org

I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students this cycle! You should apply to work with me if you're interested in anything low-resource NLP. Some topics I'm particularly excited about currently:

One week left to apply: I'm recruiting (Ling) PhD students! Come work with me on getting NLP to work for as wide a range of languages as possible! Some perks of UR: - Only have to TA 2 semesters total - At least $3k discretionary funds for e.g. conferences - Easy access to upstate NY nature

Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/adm...