In our new paper out today at Trends in Cognitive Sciences , @leylaisi and I argue that social interaction perception is a visual process--computed by the visual system and distinct from higher-level cognitive processes. tinyurl.com/nhh2dhxt

Honored my paper with Philip Resnik was accepted to Findings of #EMNLP2023! Many psycholinguistics studies use LLMs to estimate the probability of words in context. But LLMs process statistically derived subword tokens, while human processing does not. Does the disconnect matter? 🧵

Language models are superhuman - How can we make them into more humanlike cognitive models? In a new #EMNLP2023 Findings paper w/ Tal Linzen we show that LMs with limited memory retrieval capacity pattern like humans in agreement+semantic attraction arxiv.org/abs/2310.16142 (🧵)

My colleagues and I are accepting applications for PhD students at Yale. If you think you would be a good fit, consider applying! Most of my research is about bridging the divide between linguistics and artificial intelligence (often connecting to CogSci & large language models)

🧙‍♀️ I'm hoping to recruit ~1 PhD student this cycle through BU Linguistics! Students who are broadly interested in meaning and computational models would be a good fit. I'll mention a few specific topics I've been working on & looking to expand below:

I (as well as Alex Warstadt, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Leshem (Legend) Choshen 🤖🤗 @ICML @ACL) will present the findings of the BabyLM Challenge on Dec. 7, 3:30 at CoNLL! Come see the high-level findings, as well as talks from the award-winning BabyLMs 👶

I'm really excited to be presenting this work at #EMNLP2023 and at BlackboxNLP in Singapore this week! Come stop by my poster/message me if you're interested in the topic or more generally about anything at the compling x cogsci intersection.

Do any (psycho)linguistics folks know of any summer research opportunities in the US available to non-citizens? I have an amazing student who wants to get some hands on experience at a larger institution, but most opportunities seem tied to NSF REU funding.

Think you have a model that can explain the precise magnitude of the effects we find? The best part is that the 2000 person dataset is publically available, so you can see for yourself!

I am hoping to hire a postdoc who would start in Fall 2024. If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and AI, I encourage you to apply! Please see this link for details: rtmccoy.com/prospective_po…

A bit late, but I'll be at #HSP2024 this year! Alongside some incredible coauthors (@psydock112 Suhas Arehalli Grusha Prasad @linguistbrian Tal Linzen), I'll be presenting a poster about which eye tracking measures LM surprisal does and doesn't explain in garden path sentences.

Excited to present some ongoing work at PLC48 tomorrow (Session 3A), where we test the types of morpho-phonological generalizations RNNs may form over limited training data 🤖 Joint work w/ Kyle Rawlins and Paul Smolensky

My paper (with Pavel Logacev) is out! doi.org/10.1080/232737… We tested case syncretism and its effects in Turkish agreement attraction. Unlike what is predicted by cue-based retrieval models, we (N=118) found no effect of case syncretism on the magnitude of the attraction.

📣 New paper from Cognition on modeling of locality effects in sentence comprehension using CCG. The proposed model nicely accounts for crosslinguistic facts and fits well to reading times from an English corpus! Free version (until May 26): authors.elsevier.com/a/1itqQ2Hx2xKq8

Can LMs serve as cognitive models of human language processing? Humans make syntactic agreement errors ("the key to the cabinets are rusty"). Suhas Arehalli and I tested if the errors documented in six human studies emerge in LMs. They... sometimes did. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…

I am at #ACL2024 and will be presenting joint work with Jfdsca1 at the TeachingNLP workshop. The talk is on Aug 15 11:45 am in Lotus Suite 11. I would also love to grab coffee or meals with folks to chat about computational psycholing, SLACs, or life generally.