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bastian bunzeck

@bbunzeck.bsky.social
577 followers 1.2K following 210 posts

wondering how humans and computers learn and use language 👶🧠🗣️🖥️💬 the work is mysterious and important, see bbunzeck.github.io mentally still at @ucsandiego.bsky.social, phd @clausebielefeld.bsky.social

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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 11h
📢I'm hiring a PhD student to work on interpretability for Protein Language Models! 🗓️There are now two weeks left to apply, find out more on the LION Lab website: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/
lionlabnlp.github.io
PhD Student Position in Interpretability for Protein Language Models — LION Lab
Fully funded PhD student position at LION Lab, Leipzig University, on interpretability for protein language models.
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A. Feder Cooper @afedercooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Our large-scale study of memorization of books in open-weight LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen) will appear at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling as an oral. We made a website for exploring our results on 200 books and 14 models: books-memorization.github.io
books-memorization.github.io
How much do open-weight LLMs memorize specific books?
Open-weight LLMs memorize books far more than previously believed. Memorization varies by model family, model size, and book. In extreme cases, entire books are memorized, and we can generate them eff...
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
And its a 3-way race again...
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Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Check out the paper on @alphaxiv.org ! www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.tok...
alphaxiv.org
Tokenization: A Survey for Modern NLP
While modern language models take raw text as their input and produce raw text as output, they do not operate over text directly. Hidden in the very first step of language model pipelines is...
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ACL 2027 @aclmeeting.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🔔CFP for the #ACL2027NLP main conference is up! 2027.aclweb.org/calls/main/ 📝Submission deadline to ARR is Jan 4, 2027.
2027.aclweb.org
Main Conference Papers
ACL 2027 Call for Papers.
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Lilian Weber @lilweb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
✨New PhD Position!✨ Come and work with us on understanding cognition with a mix of cognitive modelling and ultrasound neuromodulation! More info on the lab & position: mic-lab.de/positions/ph... Official job ad: tinyurl.com/miclab-phd 🙏Please RT - deadline is Oct 14 ‼️
mic-lab.de
Research Associate (m/f/d): Models, Interventions, and Cognition — MIC-Lab
Models and interventions of cognition.
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
We've just released a new version of childes-db, my lab's interface to the CHILDES database of child language transcripts. It lets you work with CHILDES data from R through a versioned, reproducible API. A few updates 🧵 childes-db.stanford.edu/
Screenshot of the childes-db website: 'A flexible and reproducible interface to CHILDES.' childes-db 2026.1 contains 56,579 transcripts from 9,151 children across 437 corpora, with panels for an R API tutorial and interactive visualizations of mean length of utterance by child age.
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Come be my colleague and teach meaning at UT Austin Linguistics!
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DM Howcroft 🦔 @davehowcroft.com · 23/09/2026
I think one of the issues we're seeing is a disconnect between busyness/output and productivity--I think productivity assumes there is value in the product and it will be a while until the majority of "paper shaped objects" are in fact papers.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Rising paper numbers won’t collapse the scientific system, it’ll just return it to an older state where you only read papers by people you know and trust. Not saying this is a good thing.
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bergelsonlab @bergelsonlab.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
reviewer 2: so uh, tell me about your filtering process bc that is a truly unexpected result me: ikr??
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🦁LION Lab is hiring! 🧑‍🔬One fully funded PhD student (TVL-13 100%) for 3 years 💉Topic: Interpretability for Protein Language Models 👥Advised by @weissweiler.bsky.social together with Clara Schoeder 🌍Leipzig, Germany 🔗Apply by Oct 15: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/ Please share! #NLProc #NLP
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Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
medium.com
Asking Authors About Their Own Papers
By Nihar B. Shah
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Pranav A @pranav-nlp.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Now at KONVENS,Barbara Plank starts off with a keynote on how variability and disagreement is useful for NLP tasks.
Barbara plank giving a keynote talk on human label variation
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
#COLING2027 has joined forces with #EACL2027 and #NAACL2027 for the call for tutorials! 📢Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals (EACL/NAACL/COLING) 2027 🗓️Submission deadline: Friday, 2 October 2026 📝Submit via softconf: softconf.com/p/eacl-tutor... 🔗Full call here: 2027.coling-iccl.org/calls/tutori...
2027.coling-iccl.org
Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals 2027
COLING 2027 Tutorials
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Tomás Ryan @tjryan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
"MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely..." This is the way forward @tcddublin.bsky.social
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neutral @neutral.zone · 12/09/2026
Frontier Psychiatrist sounds like an Anthropic job posting
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Processor of Natural Languages @processorofnl.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
hot take: You should not need to be a cryptic crossword solving genius to comprehend the writing to a paper's abstract.
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Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science bot @oecs-bot.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Distinguishing between our species and other animals requires balancing subtle quantitative differences with the unique, complex interplay of our… Uniquely Human Cognition by Daniel B. M. Haun doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.2760bd31 #CognitiveScience
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: "Uniquely Human Cognition" by Daniel B. M. Haun. Uniquely human cognition refers to aspects of cognition that are specific to our evolutionary lineage and distinguish us from other animals, including our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primat
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Lisa Bylinina @bylinina.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
look at my new babylm paper! arxiv.org/abs/2609.11870 basically, i initialize token embeddings with representations from an image encoder rather than randomly and then train text-only as usual. kind of a visual demonstration to start off the word learning process
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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:
authors.elsevier.com
Please wait whilst we redirect you
All content on this site: Copyright © 2026 Elsevier B.V., its licensors, and contributors. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. For all open access content, the relevant licensing terms apply.
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ACL 2027 @aclmeeting.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy: We are introducing changes in the @ReviewAcl reviewing and submissions. The changes will cap authors and introduce changes in the reviewing to keep our community sustainable. #NLProc #NLP
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Criticised the over-use of Claude-isms in 3/4 ARR papers this cycle 🥲
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Understanding how learners conclude “X laughed Y” is incorrect is an age-old question, with several hypotheses, some of which have been ~impossible to disentangle! @tomyxw.bsky.social, @fredashi.bsky.social, and I use controlled rearing to shed light on this in our new EMNLP paper: 1/n
Title slide for “Disentangling Statistical Preemption from Entrenchment in Language Models’ Avoidance of Overgeneralization,” by Yixuan Wang, Freda Shi, and Kanishka Misra. Includes the main results plot and experimental design.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Cannot believe there’s a tremendous mathematical result and instead of being exciting it’s annoying
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
My current opinion on semantic cognition x LMs will appear in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences' Special issue on AI and Psychology, edited by the incredible @neuranna.bsky.social and @stepalminteri.bsky.social Catch the updated version: osf.io/preprints/ps... Grateful to both reviewers!
Title page of “Semantic Cognition for and from Language Models” by me and an arrow pointing downwards to the fact that it will appear in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences!
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Daniel Duran @simphon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Thanks to @stefanhartmann.bsky.social and @bbunzeck.bsky.social for organizing the session “Computational approaches to language dynamics” at #DGKL2026 ! It was great to attend those fascinating presentations, have interesting discussions and also see that computational modelling is well and alive!
uni-bielefeld.de
DGKL2026 - Universität Bielefeld
This is the webpage of the DGKL conference 2026
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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 (The result of an 8-year project!) LLMs seem very different from symbolic systems. Yet LLMs excel in symbolic domains (e.g., language/code/math). How do they do it? Our finding: LLM representations have implicit symbolic structure! Link in thread ⬇️ 1/n
Overview of the paper. 
Title: The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Tom McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen, Paul Smolensky
Left: Neural networks encode information in vectors (there is then an image of a vector), yet they excel at tasks long thought to require symbolic structure (there is then an image of a symbolic representation, specifically a syntax tree). How do LLMs do it?
Right: We find that LLM representations can be closely approximated with symbolic structures. This approximation lets us edit the structure of an LLM’s output by editing the structure of its internal representations, as shown. There is then an image of two edits to LLMs. In the first one, the original input is 3 + 6 * 8, with an answer of 51. But if we swap the positions of the 3 and the 6, the output becomes 30. In the second one, the original input is a Python command repeating the list [Z, U] three times, producing [Z, U, Z, U, Z, U]. But if we edit the input in a way that adds a Q at the end of the input, the output becomes [Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q, Z, U, Q].
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
New paper out in @openmindjournal.bsky.social! "Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks". With @jamichaelov.bsky.social , @camrobjones.bsky.social , Tyler Chang, and Ben Bergen. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks
Abstract. In order to ask questions about the mechanisms underpinning human cognition, researchers must control for properties of stimuli that could confound detected effects. In experiments involving...
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DGKL-GCLA @dgkl-gcla.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Hello Bielefeld! 👋 #DGKL2026 is underway! That also means it's time for a general assembly and an election of a new DGKL/GLCA board. 🗳️ We are still looking for new board members. 🤓 Join us tonight at 6.00 pm and participate!
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Daniel Duran @simphon.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Bastian Bunzeck presenting Universal Dependencies annotations of constructions in child-caretaker dialogues at the 11th International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association #DGKL in Bielefeld. @bbunzeck.bsky.social‬ #LINCC #CRC1646
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Excited to finally be back in Bielefeld for @dgkl2026.bsky.social! Me and @stefanhartmann.bsky.social are organising a theme session on »Computational approaches« featuring @anthe.sevenants.net, @simphon.bsky.social and many others (that I did not find on here!). 🤖💬
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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I think that your article does a great job at mentioning much of the additional input kids get and how researchers are trying to incorporate that into AI models. My point was simply that given that, current models get rather impoverished input and do not learn from actual interaction (like children)
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 16/04/2026
are you there claude? it's me, margaret
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Xiulin Yang @xiulinyang.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
🍎🍊 How would you know if a language model is better at one language than another? Our #EMNLP2026 paper argues that only one metric can actually lead to fair crosslingual evaluation. This work is a collaboration with @wegotlieb.bsky.social & @catherinearnett.bsky.social! (1/5)
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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 27/08/2026
Apparently in the next version of Fable, Anthropic changed their tokenizer based on real world usage and made “Let me check rather than answer from memory” into a single token, reportedly saving 43% of all token generation very interesting tinyurl.com/58zf9d3c
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Tal Linzen @tallinzen.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Thanks to the National Science Foundation for featuring our new @pnas.org paper, and for the continued support for basic science projects like this one!
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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 26/08/2026
To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution
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Rachel Courtland @rachelcourtland.com · 24/08/2026
I've been waiting for this feature to post online! For our Kids issue, @elisecutts.bsky.social explores a big open question: why children seem to acquire language so much more efficiently than LLMs. ter.li/0lqpwc1w
ter.li
Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why
LLMs need vastly more data than children to learn language. Understanding why could help us create more efficient models—and reveal more about developing minds.
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Great slide by @kanishka.bsky.social on how he envisions the link between machine cognition and human cognition. 🤖👶
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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 22/08/2026
Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Linguist: What even is a cup, exactly
image from labov's 1973ish study of cups and bowls and semantic boundaries, a bunch of weird cuppy thing are illustrated including a mug with a loooong fluted stem and a triangle mugneat bar graph of cuppiness and bowliness
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Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Developmentalist: Curious if the cup started out full and is emptying or started out empty and is filling.
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Caroline Rowland @carorowland.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Two lectures down, three to go in this week's Analytical Connectionism summer school. Today we tackle the sometimes feisty subject of how children acquire grammar. So many myths & misconceptions out there, I'm gonna start with theories &frameworks www.analytical-connectionism.net/school/2026/
"Modern theoretical divisions (with fuzzy boundaries!). A 2x2 grid crossing Formalist/Functionalist (rows) with Nativist/Constructivist (columns). Formalist-Nativist: grammar is an autonomous formal system independent of meaning; innate grammatical knowledge is present at birth. Formalist-Constructivist: grammar is an autonomous formal system independent of meaning; grammatical knowledge is built from experience over time. Functionalist-Nativist: grammar is shaped by and explicable in terms of the communicative function it serves; innate grammatical knowledge is present at birth. Functionalist-Constructivist: grammar is shaped by and explicable in terms of the communicative function it serves; grammatical knowledge is built from experience over time.
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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Since many are starting grad school soon, let me re-share my One Big Tip™️ for research! Research involves many skills - collaborating, writing, presenting, etc. But many of these skills can be unified under a single overarching ability: theory of mind Blog post link in reply
Illustration of the blog post's main argument, summarized as: "Theory of Mind as a Central Skill for Researchers: Research involves many skills.If each skill is viewed separately, each one takes a long time to learn. These skills can instead be connected via theory of mind – the ability to reason about the mental states of others. This allows you to transfer your abilities across areas, making it easier to gain new skills."
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micha heilbron @mheilbron.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
New preprint, w/ Karolina Drożdż Understanding language requires internally modelling what's happening where, even when unstated We built a new task to measure this ability in language models and people, and find it emerges at model scales far smaller than previously thought
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Always good to remember as people who study the capital L in LMs: language (learning) was one of the very first problems tackled in connectionist modeling 🫡
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Stefan Hartmann @stefanhartmann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
#Protolang is coming back to Toruń next year 🤩
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Michael Biehl @michaelbiehl.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
as found in the internet, first in covid times, see knowyourmeme.com/memes/unfini...
knowyourmeme.com
Unfinished Horse Drawing / Flaming Horse Rating | Know Your Meme
Unfinished Horse Drawing is an exploitable image macro of an illustration of a horse split into two halves, one detailed and the other crude. The image has
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I did not bring a poster to the Analytical Connectionism summer school, but at least I can do some live reporting 🙂‍↕️
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bastian bunzeck @bbunzeck.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Oh yeah, I’m in Gothenburg for the next two weeks for this incredibly exciting summer school 🎉
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