I am once again asking ESL companies to tone down the blatant racism underlying what they consider a "native English speaker"

WOW - what an incredible 4 weeks at #LSAInstitute2023! We had 86 courses, 7 amazing invited lectures, and over 400 participants! THANK YOU to all participants & instructors for making it a memorable one! 🤩 Linguistic Society of America

Anyone interested in public education should get informed about what's happening at WVU. This piece by Jonah Katz is a good place to start. He's a UMass Linguistics BA, a point of pride for our department, and that brings this home particularly closely. community.wvu.edu/~jokatz/Closur…

Preserve Students' Rights to Study World Languages at WVU - Sign the Petition! chng.it/JZTrGV58 via Change.org

Our department has written an open letter. "[T]his will have the effect of depriving future students at WVU of a fundamental educational opportunity, the ability to experience the world using a language other than English." blogs.umass.edu/linguist/2023/…

No time to make a poster, so this will have to do. Gateway City Arts in one week!

I've got some invite codes. DM or email me. A lot of linguists over there, and maybe it could turn into a good place to share news and chat.

The Society for Computation in Linguistics will meet June 25-27 2024 at the University of California Irvine. The plan for 2025 is to meet with the LSA annual meeting, which is usually held in early January. Sign up to our e-mail list for updates! blogs.umass.edu/scil/mailing-l…

I've been involved in organizing the Society for Computational Linguistics annual meeting since 2018. Feels great to be able to pass it off to others. Thanks so much to the co-chairs for those 6 years, and Richard Futrell and Carolyn Davis for taking on '24 and '25!

Okay, let’s talk about “learning loss”. (H/t McKinsey & Company) US high school test scores (ACT) are out - they’ve fallen steeply for the 4th year in a row. Now at their lowest level in 30yrs. Let’s look at the data & the media narrative and weigh potential explanations, shall we? (1/)

The UMass PhD in Linguistics application deadline is Dec. 20th. We have a collaborative advising approach. I look forward to working with new students in phonology, esp. in probabilistic constraint based analysis, computation and experimentation. umass.edu/graduate/acade…

The OpenAI drama feels like what would happen if a Sociology department accidentally became a Fortune 500 company

As a lover of swag, I'm very excited to announce this collaboration. Claim some beautiful art for your home that will remind you and guests about the importance of local news for years to come!

I've been doing some research into early critiques of AI and it's FASCINATING. In 1842, Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer code. In her notes, she used a #music example to talk about AI's potentials, and in the same breath talked about its limitations. She wrote: (1/x)

This article has been months in the making — I hope it leads to some serious reflection on police involvement in mental health response, as the "co-responder" model becomes the norm in western Mass.

interested in plants Actually, I think it has to do with a combo of parental pressure and inflexible work places. Parents push for earlier calls as they have to make care plans for kids given their jobs/work. This causes schools to make calls earlier than is prudent. Parents are pissed with late

Ig is down so a friendly reminder to my hampshire county peeps that we have nice lunch specials at the coffee counter today (keystone building Easthampton) — turki sub and bibimbap bowls.

ALERT! Plainfield and Ashfield MA getting large hail, get inside…. There is rotation with this cell, and I cannot rule out a funnel cloud or even a tornado as it tracks east into Ashfield and Conway… no tornado observed as of 4:30pm… supercell forming, 45000 feet tall...

So glad I happened to leave work early and got to Ashfield 10 minutes before this started. It's wild!

If you are at #CogSci2024, come by our poster "Distilling Symbolic Priors for Concept Learning into Neural Networks"! We distill a Bayesian model of concept learning into neural nets, resulting in neural nets that learn concepts like a Bayesian model. P3-N-680 at 1:00 today!