Excited to share that my brilliant colleague Mitja Nikolaus, who also happens to be the first PhD researcher I supervised (together with Laurent Prévot), has received @univamu's best PhD Award! 🎉 Read about his research in this paper osf.io/preprints/psya…

New paper out 🎉 !! Masoud and I wrote a perspective on how modern LMs and AI models can be useful for studying language acquisition in kids. Check out the open source paper in Language and Linguistics Compass: dx.doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.7… and this original thread:

Come work with us! ru.nl/en/working-at/…

I'm excited to announce my new lab: UCSD's Learning Meaning and Natural Language Lab. a.k.a. LeM🍋N Lab! And 📢WE ARE RECRUITING📢 PhD students to join us in sunny San Diego in either Linguistics OR Data Science. Apply by Dec 4: connect.grad.ucsd.edu/apply/ More about the lab👇

🤔What model explanation method should you use? How to ensure it reflects the model’s true reasoning? 🌟 In our CL survey, Towards Faithful Model Explanation in NLP, we review 110+ explainability methods through the lens of faithfulness. Check out my presentation at #EMNLP2024!

Join us for the 2nd Workshop on Multimodality in Interactions on the 2nd-3rd December in Marseille! 🤸🏻‍♀️The program is super interesting! 🤓➡Look at the abstracts! 💥tinyurl.com/4wt2j8wz Website with all info! Register!❗ …yinsocialinteractions20.wordpress.com *Posters are still welcome!!* 🤗

I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! My lab works at the intersection of information theory, cognition, language, and AI. Wanna hear more? I asked notebookLM to generate a podcast just for you (but pls take it with a big grain of salt...) youtu.be/9L04S4jvspI

🎉 On Nov 26th, join us at White Rabbit (La Joliette) for a fun science evening with Un Prétexte! 5 PhD students will present their research on sound & communication. 🍻💬 Register: [email protected]. Start at 8 PM, doors open at 6 PM! #BringYourScience

📢 Good news for the research community! You have two additional weeks to submit your input on the draft rules on data access for researchers under the Digital Services Act. ⏰ Send your contribution by 10 December 👇 #DSA

To everyone with a psychology, cognitive science, linguistics background (or beyond!) out here who's ever wondered how their research could contribute to ML — this one's for you!

" Decode, Move and Speak! Self-supervised Learning of Speech Units, Gestures, and Sound Relationships Using Vocal Imitation" Check out our new journal paper published in Computational Linguistics (a thread) tinyurl.com/4pzr52cp

If you're interested in working on multimodal understanding and generation — including things like understanding or generating figures with text — and work with my awesome collaborator Ishita Dasgupta & others, check out this job! boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/…

I now have an account on Blue Sky. You can follow our research and events here: fourtassi.bsky.social

I'm excited to announce the release of the special issue "Language Learning, Representation, and Processing in Humans and Machines," which I co-guest edited with Marianna Apidianaki and Sebastian Padó, in Computational Linguistics. See my thread on Bsky: bsky.app/profile/fourta…

🎓 Exciting HDR defense by Abdellah Fourtassi -Abdellah Fourtassi! "How Machine Learning is Transforming the Science of Language Acquisition" 🗓️ Jan 17, 14:00 📍 Campus Saint-Charles, Salle des Séminaires Frumam Explore the impact of NLP on child language development! #LanguageAcquisition

The rapid progression from text-based grounding to multimodal embodied AI shows how functional grounding is becoming essential for genAI agents. 🔗 Blog: lnkd.in/etpEGfT4 📄 Paper: lnkd.in/eBYddX-n

Interesting critique thread, curious to hear thoughts. Centaur, a transformer fine-tuned on human behavioral data, still has massively superhuman working memory; may be hard to fine-tune away that particular property of transformers. This makes sense to me as a framework for

SIGdial has three fantastic keynotes this year & registration is open! 🎉 "Are there purely multi-turn 'dialog failures'?" by Chris Welty "Interactive Task Learning" by Alex Lascarides "Ecological Study of Language Acquisition, the role of natural conversation" by Abdellah Fourtassi

🚨 New paper in First Language Journal (yayyy)!! "Speech Reduction in Middle Childhood: the Case of Child–Caregiver Interactions" We studied how kids (7–11) and their caregivers produce speech reductions in everyday interactions. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/KCWYUVC…

On a personal note 🎉: Huge thanks to Abdellah Fourtassi who first sparked my interest in children’s conversational skills during my master’s thesis! It feels amazing to see that curiosity come full circle, this paper brings those early ideas into my doctoral research!