"ARGH... WHY IS THIS SO HARD."

How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models - Volume 49

Jeff Mitchell, Jeffrey Bowers. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2020.

No usage-based linguistics without language use - Volume 49

Robbie Kubala’s excellent paper on “The Aesthetics of Crosswords” talks about three sources of aesthetic value in a crossword: “the aesthetic experience of struggling for an…

The success of large language models (LLMs) across many domains of AI research has generated intense debate. Some attribute their impressive performance on complex tasks to human-like linguistic and ...

Conceptual analysis -- proposing definitions and refining them through counterexamples -- is central to philosophical methodology. We study whether language models can perform this task through iterat...

Conceptual analysis -- proposing definitions and refining them through counterexamples -- is central to philosophical methodology. We study whether language models can perform this task through iterat...

Futrell and Mahowald (2025) argue that neural networks have learned non-trivial aspects of language. We argue that these systems have not in fact demonstrated “mastery” (2025: 10) of syntax, marshalli...

Norm, the formal theoretical linguist, and Claudette, the computational language scientist, have a lovely time discussing whether modern language models can inform important questions in the language ...

Large language models are interesting, but linguistics and cognitive science should be cautious about centering any new technology as a magic bullet. Doing so reinforces the historically “narrow focus...

Introspection is a foundational cognitive ability, but its mechanism is not well understood. Recent work has shown that AI models can introspect. We study their mechanism of introspection, first exten...

Acknowledging that large language models have learned to use language can open doors to breakthrough language science. Achieving these breakthroughs may require abandoning some long-held ideas about h...