New paper at CL! Eye Tracking Based Cognitive Evaluation of Automatic Readability Assessment Methods TLDR: existing readability assessment methods (including LLMs) are poor predictors of reading ease. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11150 Image: a readability formula from 1948 still in use

New paper at CL! Eye Tracking Based Cognitive Evaluation of Automatic Readability Assessment Methods TLDR: existing readability assessment methods (including LLMs) are poor predictors of reading ease. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11150 Image: a readability formula from 1948 still in use

CoNLL 2026 is just around the corner! Join us for our first keynote: Michael C. Frank (Stanford University) “Comparing early language learning in children and language models” 📅 Friday, July 3, 2026 🕘 09:15 📍 Room Harbor B #CoNLL2026 #NLP #LanguageAcquisition

Hallucinated references are the talk of the town now. How did we go about paper submissions with "hallucinated" references? At CoNLL, we viewed incorrect references as a violation of fundamental scholarly standards, and papers with such references were not sent for review.

Coming up at ICLR! Check out pretty incredible work by Cfir Hadar, Omer Shubi, Yoav Meiri and Amit Heshes on decoding open-ended reading goals from eye movements 👀 🤯 openreview.net/pdf?id=fHr1u...

🚨 CoNLL 2026: Call for Papers 🚨 📍San Diego | July 3–4, 2026 (co-located w/ ACL). 🙋‍♀️Focus: theoretically/cognitively motivated CL & NLP NEW Areas: Computational Usage-Based Grammars + Language & the Brain. (Online presentation option available) 📅 Deadline Feb 19, 2026 (AoE): bit.ly/4kgRyKF

A short survey on research practices with eye-tracking data, especially in reading studies, as part of the OpenEye Project soscisurvey.de/OpenEye/ Deadline for participation: December 20

Super excited to co-chair (with Claire Bonial) my favorite NLP conference - CoNLL! If you think your work will matter not just now, but also in 5 or 10 years, you should submit it to CoNLL 2026! CFP: conll.org

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Now out in Scientific Data, OneStop: A 360-Participant English Eye Tracking Dataset with Different Reading Regimes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OneStop: A 360-Participant English Eye Tracking Dataset with Different Reading Regimes - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - OneStop: A 360-Participant English Eye Tracking Dataset with Different Reading Regimes

nature.com

#NeurIPS2025 Check out EyeBench 👀, a mega-project which provides a much needed infrastructure for loading & preprocessing eye-tracking for reading datasets, and addressing super exciting modeling challenges: decoding linguistic knowledge 👩 and reading interactions 👩+📖 from gaze! eyebench.github.io

It's officially been 75 years since the proposal of the Turing Test, a good time bring up 'The Minimal Turing Test': www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

if any

my friend/colleague Frank Jäkel wrote a book on AI. I sadly don't know German but I happily know Frank, and I've heard him talking about this for a while now, and just on that basis I'd recommend the German speakers in the audience check it out

We had a lot of fun delivering the Eye Tracking and NLP tutorial at ACL! The slides are available on the tutorial website acl2025-eyetracking-and-nlp.github.io

Help us record firefly flashes! 👇🙏

George Musser@georgemusser.com · last yr.

Do you have fireflies in your backyard? Biologist @oritpeleg.bsky.social is collecting data! #emergence docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot: "Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" (by Balaban & me) relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind. Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu

👀 📖 Big news! 📖 👀 Happy to announce the release of the OneStop Eye Movements dataset! 🎉 🎉 OneStop is the product of over 6 years of experimental design, data collection and data curation. github.com/lacclab/OneS...

New paper! We show that eye movements during normal reading (no extra task) are effective at predicting reading comprehension as measured by recall. Both early and late eye-movement measures are key. This research was led by the amazing Diane Mézière. ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

<em>Reading Research Quarterly</em> | ILA Literacy Journal | Wiley Online Library

Recent research on the use of eye movements to predict performance on reading comprehension tasks suggests that while eye movements may be used to measure comprehension, the relationship between eye-...

ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

In person (no streaming/zoom) sentence processing workshop at Potsdam with Tal Linzen, Brian Dillon, Titus von der Malsburg, Oezge Bakay, William Timkey, Pia Schoknecht, Michael Vrazitulis, and Johan Hennert: vasishth.github.io/sentproc-wor...

🤖🧠 Paper out in Nature Communications! 🧠🤖 Bayesian models can learn rapidly. Neural networks can handle messy, naturalistic data. How can we combine these strengths? Our answer: Use meta-learning to distill Bayesian priors into a neural network! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

Made a new assignment for a class on Computational Psycholinguistics: - I trained a Transformer language model on sentences sampled from a PCFG - The students' task: Given the Transformer, try to infer the PCFG (w/ a leaderboard for who got closest) Would recommend! 1/n

Check out our new work on introspection in LLMs! 🔍 TL;DR we find no evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own knowledge. Beyond the study of LLM introspection, our findings inform an ongoing debate in linguistics research: prompting (eg grammaticality judgments) =/= prob measurement!

Siyuan Song@siyuansong.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language? Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)

it's only Consciousness if it comes from the Consciousness region of the brain, otherwise its just sparkling attention

new preprint on Theory of Mind in LLMs, a topic I know a lot of people care about (I care. I'm part of people): "Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models" (by Hu* @jennhu.bsky.social , Sosa, and me) link: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.21098

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence! From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

Hello! I'm looking to hire a post-doc, to start this Summer or Fall. It'd be great if you could share this widely with people you think might be interested. More details on the position & how to apply: bit.ly/cocodev_post... Official posting here: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14723

Our language neuroscience lab (evlab.mit.edu) is looking for a new lab manager/FT RA to start in the summer. Apply here: tinyurl.com/3r346k66 We'll start reviewing apps in early Mar. (Unfortunately, MIT does not sponsor visas for these positions, but OPT works.)

EvLab

Our research aims to understand how the language system works and how it fits into the broader landscape of the human mind and brain.

evlab.mit.edu