Reuse what you can, differentiate what you must; at every level of the word. A unified explanation of cross-linguistic regularity at and below the word level. Now out in Nature Human Behaviour, from Thomas Brochhagen, Xixian Liao, Jamie Wright, and Carmen Saldana: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The interaction of meaning similarity and confusability explains regularity in form–meaning mappings at and below the word level - Nature Human Behaviour

Languages exhibit striking regularities in how meanings are mapped to word forms, yet analogous patterns at the subword level remain under-explored. This study fills the gap with a large-scale cross-l...

nature.com

Announcing our Trends in Language Evolution, Change, and Diversity workshop June 4th at UPF Poblenou! Featuring talks from Chiara Barbieri (Cagliari/Zürich), Gemma Boleda (ICREA/UPF), Karolina Grzech (UPF), Carmen Saldana (UB), Jamie D. Wright (Namur/Brussels) Sign up! www.upf.edu/web/colt/tre...

TRENCADIS Workshop - COLT: Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory - UPF

upf.edu

Presenting this at #ICML with @rjantonello.bsky.social and Aditya Vaidya✨ Why do 𝙢𝙞𝙙𝙙𝙡𝙚 layers in LLMs and speech-audio models best predict brain responses to language? We show a peak in the dimensionality of 🤖 activations (left) to track high 🧠 predictivity (right) 🧵(cross-posted from X)

Releasing v. 2.3 of ManyNames, an object naming dataset with 25K objects in real world images (English, plus partial coverage in Catalan and Mandarin Chinese). Check it out! amore-upf.github.io/manynames/ (New in this version: further data cleaning, speaker ID, more lexical info)

Our group presented our work at Deep Learning BCN! Some highlights below. @dlbcnai.bsky.social

Many forces have been argued to shape natural language lexica, and there are different ways they can be operationalized and interact. We study which out of a set of forces and their interactions best fit cross-linguistic data. Now out in Cognitive Science: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Assessing Pressures Shaping Natural Language Lexica

Human languages balance communicative informativity with complexity, conveying as much as needed through the simplest means required to do so. Yet, these concepts—informativity and complexity—have be...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Do you use a pronoun more often when the entity you’re talking about is more predictable? Previous work offers diverging answers so we conducted a meta-analysis, combining data from 20 studies across 8 different languages. Now out in Language: muse.jhu.edu/article/969615

📢 Seminari de recerca organitzat pel COLT- URLING, "LLM and human language: representations, judgments, and historical change". 📆 29/09/2025 🕦 15:30 🎤 Adele Goldberg (Princeton University) 🚩55.410, Edifici Tànger del Campus Poblenou - UPF ℹ️ ja.cat/wi2t7 @colt-upf.bsky.social

📢 Seminari de recerca organitzat pel COLT- URLING, "Associative memory in psycholinguistics and in AI architectures". 📆 01/10/2025 🕦 12:00 🎤 Jakub Dotlačil 🚩55.410, Edifici Tànger del Campus Poblenou - UPF ℹ️ ja.cat/U5xH2 @colt-upf.bsky.social

New paper! 🚨 I argue that LLMs represent a synthesis between distributed and symbolic approaches to language, because, when exposed to language, they develop highly symbolic representations and processing mechanisms in addition to distributed ones. arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

📢I am hiring a Postdoc to work on post-training methods for low-resource languages. Apply by August 15 employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho.... Let's talk at #ACL2025NLP in Vienna if you want to know more about the position and life in Denmark.

Postdoc in Natural Language Processing

employment.ku.dk

Evaluating topic models (and document clustering methods) is hard. In fact, since our paper critiquing standard evaluation practices four years ago, there hasn't been a good replacement metric That ends today (we hope)! Our new ACL paper introduces an LLM-based evaluation protocol 🧵

🎉New paper "Prediction Hubs are Context-Informed Frequent Tokens in LLMs" from our lab, accepted at ACL 2025! If you're interested in representational geometry, come find Beatrix Nielsen and Marco Baroni at the poster :)

Beatrix M. G. Nielsen@beatrixmgn.bsky.social · last yr.

Our paper "Prediction Hubs are Context-Informed Frequent Tokens in LLMs" has been accepted at ACL 2025! Main points: 1. Hubness is not a problem when language models do next-token prediction. 2. Nuisance hubness can appear when other comparisons are made.

Today at UPF Campus de la Ciutadella at 2:30 pm! Come slightly earlier to check in! Sala Polivalent 24S18 maps.app.goo.gl/n1hBxiviKcLW...

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · last yr.

⭐ Registration open til May 27th! ⭐ Website: www.upf.edu/web/colt/sym... June 2nd, UPF 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗽: Arianna Bisazza (language acquisition with NNs) Naomi Saphra (emergence in LLM training dynamics) Jean-Rémi King (TBD) Louise McNally (pitfalls of contextual/formal accounts of semantics)

📢 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲📢 UPF Campus de la Ciutadella **Sala Polivalent 24.S18** Thank you for bearing with us!

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · last yr.

Last day to sign up for the COLT Symposium! Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 📢 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲📢 June 2nd, 14:30 - 19:00 UPF Campus de la Ciutadella Room 40.101 maps.app.goo.gl/1216LJRsWmTE...

Last day to sign up for the COLT Symposium! Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 📢 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲📢 June 2nd, 14:30 - 19:00 UPF Campus de la Ciutadella Room 40.101 maps.app.goo.gl/1216LJRsWmTE...

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · last yr.

⭐ Registration open til May 27th! ⭐ Website: www.upf.edu/web/colt/sym... June 2nd, UPF 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗽: Arianna Bisazza (language acquisition with NNs) Naomi Saphra (emergence in LLM training dynamics) Jean-Rémi King (TBD) Louise McNally (pitfalls of contextual/formal accounts of semantics)

⭐ Registration open til May 27th! ⭐ Website: www.upf.edu/web/colt/sym... June 2nd, UPF 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗽: Arianna Bisazza (language acquisition with NNs) Naomi Saphra (emergence in LLM training dynamics) Jean-Rémi King (TBD) Louise McNally (pitfalls of contextual/formal accounts of semantics)

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · last yr.

Announcing the COLT Symposium on June 2nd! 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 What properties of language are emerging from work in experimental and theoretical linguistics, neuroscience & LLM interpretability? Info: tinyurl.com/colt-site Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 🧵1/3

Updated website: www.upf.edu/web/colt/sym...

Computational Linguistics @UPF@colt-upf.bsky.social · last yr.

Announcing the COLT Symposium on June 2nd! 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 What properties of language are emerging from work in experimental and theoretical linguistics, neuroscience & LLM interpretability? Info: tinyurl.com/colt-site Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 🧵1/3

Announcing the COLT Symposium on June 2nd! 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 What properties of language are emerging from work in experimental and theoretical linguistics, neuroscience & LLM interpretability? Info: tinyurl.com/colt-site Register: tinyurl.com/colt-register 🧵1/3

Please find us at #ICLR2025! We will present our work on intrinsic dimension as a cue for stages of language processing in LLMs. Saturday morning, Poster session 5 Hall 3 + Hall2B #563 iclr.cc/virtual/2025... Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2405.15471

Emily Cheng@emcheng.bsky.social · 2y ago

Here's our work accepted to #ICLR2025! We look at how intrinsic dimension evolves over LLM layers, spotting a universal high-dimensional phase. This ID peak is where: - linguistic features are built - different LLMs are most similar, with implications for task transfer 🧵 1/6

📢 Upcoming Seminar Words are weird? On the role of lexical ambiguity in language 🗣 Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Why is language so ambiguous? Discover how ambiguity balances cognitive simplicity and communicative complexity through large-scale studies. 📍 UniMiB, Room U6-01C, Milan

⚡New position paper from Gemma Boleda: is it time to make peace between symbolic and continuous approaches to language?

Gemma Boleda@gboleda.bsky.social · last yr.

new pre-print: LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and continuous approaches to language arxiv.org/abs/2502.11856

The project I did with Marco Baroni and Iuri Macocco while I was in Barcelona is now on Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2502.10201 🎉 TLDR below 👇

Prediction hubs are context-informed frequent tokens in LLMs

Hubness, the tendency for few points to be among the nearest neighbours of a disproportionate number of other points, commonly arises when applying standard distance measures to high-dimensional data,...

arxiv.org

This year, CoNLL will be accepting *non-archival* (as well as archival) submissions! www.conll.org #CoNLL2025 Follow CoNLL at @conll-conf.bsky.social

Here's our work accepted to #ICLR2025! We look at how intrinsic dimension evolves over LLM layers, spotting a universal high-dimensional phase. This ID peak is where: - linguistic features are built - different LLMs are most similar, with implications for task transfer 🧵 1/6

Què és l’aprenentatge profund ? La @marionamec.bsky.social de @neurofregides.bsky.social ens ho explica en motiu del Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium 2024 (@dlbcn.ai), aquest dijous 19 de desembre. #deeplearning #ciencia #català #barcelona www.youtube.com/shorts/R4u_Z...

Què és l'aprenentatge profund ? - La Dimoni de Maxwell #deeplearning #ciencia #català #barcelona

YouTube video by Deep Learning Barcelona

youtube.com

🔊New EMNLP paper from Eleonora Gualdoni & @gboleda.bsky.social ! Why do objects have many names? Human lexicons contain different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., purple or magenta for the same color. We investigate using tools from efficient coding...🧵 1/3

Hello🌍! We're a computational linguistics group in Barcelona headed by Gemma Boleda, Marco Baroni & Thomas Brochhagen We do psycholinguistics, cogsci, language evolution & NLP, with diverse backgrounds in philosophy, formal linguistics, CS & physics Get in touch for postdoc, PhD & MS openings!

⚡Postdoc opportunity w/ COLT Beatriu de Pinós contract, 3 yrs, competitive call by Catalan government. Apply with a PI (Marco Gemma or Thomas) Reqs: min 2y postdoc experience outside Spain, not having lived in Spain for >12 months in the last 3y. Application ~December-February (exact dates TBD)