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Michael Castelle

@mcastelle.bsky.social

38 Posts107 Follower80 Folgt
Michael Castelle@mcastelle.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Was a bit upset that Google managed to cite Bakhtin in a publishable paper on LLMs before me (and *cough* all of the humanities), but then saw that the lead author was a UChicago Sociology PhD student, nice one.

@jamesyoungevans.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New paper led by @junsolk.bsky.social w/ Shiyang Lai, Nino Scherrer & @blaiseaguera.bsky.social: What happens inside reasoning models like OpenAI's o-series, DeepSeek-R1, QwQ when they think? They don't just compute longer. They spontaneously generate internal debates. 🧵

Michael Castelle@mcastelle.bsky.social · 12mo ago

> be a human in an oral society without writing > all you hear are phonemes > you don't care, it's all abstracted away (Sapir 1933) > you live for a world of pure ideas, chain of concepts, reasoning streams: la pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962) > phonemes don't exist.

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Alexander Doria@dorialexander.bsky.social · 12mo ago

> be a language model > all you see is tokens > you don't care, it's all abstracted away > you live for a world of pure ideas, chain of concepts, reasoning streams > tokens don't exist.

Michael Castelle@mcastelle.bsky.social · last yr.

Even my "aggressive timelines" for weird interdisciplinary consilience at the hands of deep learning would not have predicted that in 2025 you could jam this much linguistic anthropology into an ACL paper (and get selected for an oral presentation). Congrats to all involved!

naitian@naitian.org · last yr.

I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards! (thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!) aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

A poster for "Culture is not Trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" which takes the form of a flow-chart. The central question, and the starting point of the flow chart, is "What is culture in cultural NLP?" An arrow is labeled "wait, so what's cultural NLP?" This leads to a block explaining that the goals of cultural NLP are described in section 2 of the paper. They include inclusivity, depth, discerning, and adaptiveness. That leads to an arrow that says "that sounds great!". But there are recurring challenges in this kind of work! Section 3 surveys some of these: a discomfort around the proxies being chosen, a lack of coverage, and a lack of dynamicity. That in turn leads to an arrow labeled "Hm, sounds like we need to figure out..." and it leads back to the main question: "What is culture in cultural NLP?" A final arrow extends below this block: "Well, who's to say, really?" This points to sociocultural linguistics. Section 4 explores how other disciplines, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis have faced similar challenges in the past. Section 4.2 gives an overview of sociocultural linguistics, which is a set of principles tying together some convergent themes: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness. One arrow extends from this asking, "what's that have to do with cultural NLP?" Section 5 gives a case study of how indexicality clarifies how to think about stereotypies in the context of mining cultual knowledge from the web. Another arrow says "How can I build safe NLP systems?" Section 6.2 explores how localization can serve as a useful model from building culturally aware technologies because it forces developers to define culture explicitly and tractably. Finally, an arrow asks "how can I study culture with NLP methods?" Section 6.1 lays out theoretically motivated directions for future empirical and theoretical work in computationally modeling culture.
Anna Weichselbraun@annaw.bsky.social · 3y ago

Are you a linguistic anthropologist (or related scholar/researcher) working on LLMs? Submit an abstract to this open panel for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam organized by me, @mcastelle.bsky.social, and Siri Lamoureaux!

P296: LLMs and the Language Sciences: Material, Semiotic, and Linguistic Perspectives from STS and L...

This panel convenes linguistic anthropology and STS to consider how large language models (LLMs) emerge from language-ideological and material-semiotic practices. We invite papers that contribute to b...

nomadit.co.uk

Society for Social Studies of Science@4sweb.bsky.social · 3y ago

The #EASST4S2024 Call for Abstracts is open! Submit your proposals to Open Panels, Making & Doing, Workshops, Roundtables, Closed Panels and Meet-Ups till February 12th via: easst4s2024.net/callforabstr... Questions? conference@easst4s2024.net