This week we are in Rio 🌴 🦜🩴, Brazil 🇧🇷 for CogSci 😍 @frap98.bsky.social will present on a computational study of verb meaning acquisition in children co-authors: @jumelet.bsky.social @yevgenm.bsky.social @arianna-bis.bsky.social 🏛️ Session T.04 🗓️ July 24, 10:45 @facultyofartsug.bsky.social

Excited that our paper on minimal translation pairs for ASL was recognized with a best paper award at the Workshop on Generative AI for Sign Language @ CVPR 2026! Congrats to my co-authors @skarabuklu.bsky.social, Shester, Diane, Greg, and Karen! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.27232

Big questions!

Last week, the 46th edition of 𝗧𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗗𝗔𝗚 took place, the long-standing linguistics conference organized by the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG) at the @rug.nl. This year, I had the pleasure of being part of the organizing committee!

Interested in analyzing 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱-𝗔𝗱𝘂𝗹𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 with computational tools? Then the 𝗖𝗔𝗜𝗧 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗸𝗶𝘁 🪁 (pronounced [kaIt]) might be just what you’re looking for! It includes a brand-new i𝗻-𝗱𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗿, 𝗣𝗢𝗦 𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿, and 𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿.

Announcing a new version of our 2024 paper on linguistic hypothesis generation from LMs! @najoung.bsky.social and I have systematized our hypothesis generation framework, added stringent criteria for model selection, 10x-ed our learning trials, and included an epigraph from Jeff Elman 🙏!

I’m very happy to share that my latest paper on the 𝐚𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠, tested on models trained under CDL data vs ADL data , has been accepted for an 𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 at the upcoming edition of 𝐂𝐨𝐠𝐒𝐜𝐢, which will take place at the end of July in Rio de Janeiro.💃

📈Join us for the CDH Guest Lecture - Enrico Daga: Humanities Knowledge Graphs: opportunities and challenges with gen-AI 📅Date: March 4th, 2026 ⏰Time: 11:00-12:30 🏫Location: Turft06 (Turftorenstraat, room 06)

The call is open! All researchers in linguistics and related fields and research projects are welcome to join and submit an abstract. Abstracts can be submitted through this link until March 16th 2026. For more information, check out the submission instructions on the TABU Dag website tabudag.nl

Are you based in Groningen and want to help us evaluate the Generative AI puzzle? 🍫 We are looking for participants of every age between 16 and 60 years old. 📊 Contact us and we will deliver the puzzle and cards to you in person :)

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences)

(Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

aiguide.substack.com

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues! A thread 🧵

We are thrilled to officially announce the dates of the 46th edition of 𝗧𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗗𝗔𝗚! Save the date for 𝗧𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭𝟭–𝟭𝟮 💫⁣

TABU Dag@tabudag.bsky.social · 6mo ago

We are excited to announce that the 46th edition of TABU Dag, the annual international linguistics conference organized by the University of Groningen, will take place on June 11th and 12th, 2026.

📣 I'm hiring 📣 Post-doc position at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social as part of @rug.nl CIT Innovation Fun "A3i – Artificial Intelligence Innovation Identifier" Full call is available here: lnkd.in/esdQ7YGD 📅 Application deadline: Jan. 15 2026

👀 Look what 🎅 has broght just before Christmas 🎁: a brand new Research Master in Natural Language Processing at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social @rug.nl Program: www.rug.nl/masters/natu... Applications (2026/2027) are open! Come and study with us (you will also learn why we have a 🐮 in our logo)

Natural Language Processing

How do you build Large Language Models? How do humans experience Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in their daily lives? And how can we...

rug.nl

The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a fantastic friend and researcher, @mdhk.net , who came to visit us in Groningen for a couple of days from Amsterdam! 🎉

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨ @byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸 Keynotes by @jennysaffran.bsky.social @noranewcombe.bsky.social @pyoudeyer.bsky.social More info to follow #IASL26

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

Interested in developmentally plausible LMs, and the role of child-directed language data? Come to our poster TODAY (Fr 7 Nov, 10.30-12.00) #EMNLP!

Francesca Padovani@frap98.bsky.social · last yr.

“Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models” I’m happy to share that the preprint of my first PhD project is now online! 🎊 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23689

Thrilled to be heading to Suzhou with a big team of GroNLP'ers 🐮 Interested in Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource LMs? Don't miss our posters & talks #EMNLP2025!

GroNLP@gronlp.bsky.social · 9mo ago

With only a week left for #EMNLP2025, we are happy to announce all the works we 🐮 will present 🥳 - come and say "hi" to our posters and presentations during the Main and the co-located events (*SEM and workshops) See you in Suzhou ✈️

...ii) a direct quality reward from a teacher model, and iii) a reward based on the log probabilities of a teacher model (and its dialogue continuations). While these rewards did not improve our models performance, two different DPO approaches did!

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 cpl2025.sites.uu.nl When: December 18–19, 2025 Where: Utrecht, the Netherlands Abstract submission deadline: June 15, 2025 Organizers: Jakub Dotlačil, Lena Jäger, Bruno Nicenboim, Ece Takmaz

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 | Universiteit Utrecht

Universiteit Utrecht

cpl2025.sites.uu.nl

Jane Goodall (1934-2025) 🤍

My very first book review is out now 📚 Muchas gracias to @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for inviting me, looking forward to our next project(s) 😇

Stefan Hartmann@stefanhartmann.bsky.social · 10mo ago

It's been a while since I've written a book review - here's our review of Herbst & Hoffmann (2024), my first but definitely not last collaboration with the brilliant @bbunzeck.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S136... ($)

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐂 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 (𝐄𝐑𝐂 𝐂𝐨𝐆, 𝐏𝐈 𝐀𝐧𝐚 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐟) 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫! ⁣🎉 ⁣ We have an opening for a 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 for a starting duration of 12 months extendible to 30 months.⁣ For further details -> www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀’ 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻! 😍 Here are some photos of our GroNLP station at the Forum, where we welcomed high school classes and potential future researchers. 🧑‍🔬🤖 Quizzes, puzzles, demos, card games, and of course, lots of chocolate! 🍫