How should computational (psycho)linguists properly apply token-level language models to the field’s inherently character-level problems? We try to bring some clarity in this new EMNLP paper 📣 Spoiler: you can (and should!) convert an LM over tokens into an LM over characters.

We are thrilled to announce the Interspeech 2025 URGENT Challenge, starting on 11/15! Join us in building universal speech enhancement models to tackle in-the-wild speech data using large-scale, multilingual data. Details: urgent-challenge.github.io/urgent2025/

Really excited to announce my first ever journal publication with Eleanor Chodroff: "Speech recognition in adverse conditions by humans and machines" pubs.aip.org/asa/jel/articl…

Really proud of Chloe Patman for seeing this project through from start to finish: she got the grant, published the paper, and gave us some good excuses to get outside! Loved having you here! 🏔️🇨🇭👩‍💻 See her 🧵 for more:

🦋 reminds me of early days on academic Twitter, in a good way

Sappy thanksgiving post: I believe humans are simply the product of their environment, and so I am thankful for the combined influence of the people I’ve worked with making me the researcher I am. A short history: Ryan Cotterell was the first really strong language AI researcher

Are humans or machines better at recognizing speech? A new study shows that in noisy conditions, current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems achieve remarkable accuracy and sometimes even surpass human performance. news.uzh.ch/en/articles/me…

Join us online this Friday when University of Zurich researcher Eleanor Chodroff discusses how linguists are starting to use big data to crack mysteries such as why the same sounds on paper can vary so much when spoken by different people, across different languages. bit.ly/3C8Q3wl

A true legend passed away. I'm glad I could meet with him in person for the first time in my life last year.

We're delighted to announce that #LabPhon20 will be held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, in the (North American) summer of 2026, with the theme “Looking back and looking forward.” Dates, thematic sessions, invited speakers, and more will be announced by the organizers. #LabPhon

“To write for impact means to keep it as simple as possible.” Good read and very insightful. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, so I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ Najoung Kim 🫠 Aaron Mueller. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!

Do you want to know how much it costs to publish open access in a journal? I got sick of looking this up, so made this: apc.simon.net.nz #openaccess #academicpublishing #articlepagecharges

The honest B or C student, submitting essays filled with awkward constructions, malapropisms, earnest, if failed or surface-y arguments--a surprise hero of the present age.

Three linguistics jobs at Oxford!! Please spread the word. linguistlist.org/issues/36/1438/

I’m thrilled to announce that our paper, Quantifying and Reducing Speaker Heterogeneity within the Common Voice Corpus for Phonetic Analysis, coauthored with Eleanor Chodroff, Aref Farhadipour, Jiachen Ma, Annie Baker, and Bogdan Pricop from Zurich Computational Linguistics Group was accepted for INTERSPEECH2025.

The United States has had a tremendous advantage in science and technology because it has been the consensus gathering point: the best students worldwide want to study and work in the US because that is where the best students are studying and working. 1/

1/3 The US didn’t end up leading the world in computing by luck. It happened because it made long-term, public investments in basic research, especially through NSF. That’s what created the technology that today’s companies are built on.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.00733 Our Interspeech 2025 preprint.