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Masoud

@langloglearn.bsky.social
232 followers 316 following 33 posts

Assistant Professor of linguistics at UC Davis Researching language, logic, and learning in humans & sometimes machines

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Melissa Kline Struhl @mekline.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...
giving.mit.edu
Fund Search Results | Giving to MIT
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
thank you! i enjoyed it too!
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
that's why I would not say such claims are place holders. they may be imprecise, but that is just a function of our current state of the field
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
I agree! :DA claim like "negation is innate" is underspecified and can be made precise in the three ways you mentioned and many more. I'd say all innateness claims ultimately require genetic evidence + specification of neurodevelopmental mechanisms that result in the learning, processing, & behavior
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
makes sense. It could be just terminological differences but once we separate them, innateness claims about each is substantial. Someone that claims "negation is innate" is making a substantial and (in principle) verifiable claim about representational constraints, regardless of onto/philogeny
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
2. learning mechanism (Bayesian update, trigger setting, gradient descent, etc) 3. Learning biases (e.g. priors over symbols or rules in a Bayesian system, hyper-parameter settings etc).As far as I can see these are quite separate components of learning that can be innate/learned to varying degrees
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I'm not sure if we are using the immune system example the same way so I'll set it aside to avoid confusion. More generally, any learning system can have more or less of the following innate/inbuilt components: 1. representations (e.g symbols & combinatorial rules, vector space, etc) ...
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
or specific learning mechanisms. A good analogy may be the immune system. We have innate immunity that targets pathogens based on innate representations of what pathogens look like from evolutionary exposure and we have adaptive immunity that learns new representations of pathogens in our lifetime
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I'm using innate knowledge to refer to all that is in a system prior to learning e.g. representations, learning mechanisms, biases... As Locke said no one should doubt some learning mechanisms and some capacity to represent ideas is innate. At issue is if specific ideas/representations are innate
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
I agree that inductive bias is a good term for a subclass of innate knowledge but not all innate knowledge is reducible to inductive bias obviously. In the extreme case a system can have innate stored information literally. Or innate knowledge of what info is computed how etc
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
not sure."X is innate" is a verifiable claim independent of how it evolved or developed. More clear in cases like innate vs. learned/adaptive immune system. It is currently harder to verify for cognitive constructs than biological ones but still a claim worth verifying or falsifying in its own right
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Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
how much of that is private funding/grants vs the federal government?
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
oh absolutely
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
I'm convinced over-reliance on forced choice tasks have created a lot of task-specific findings that lack external validity in different fields of behavioral sciences and one day we have to face that crisis
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
each proposition is a note? a cord is a conjunction? disjunction and negation would be hard to play but maybe we gotta limit it to one octave :))
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Kinda fascinating how researchers (systematically?) overestimate cognitive abilities of human-built systems like LLMs while underestimating the cognitive abilities of natural systems like animals or children
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Ethan Jacobs 🇺🇦 @ejacobslaw.com · 08/01/2025
LA fires are a good reminder that the only difference between me and any refugee is luck.
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Raúl Aranovich @raul-aranovich.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
Very sad to have to share news of my old friend and colleague Bob Bayley's passing. He was a true scholar, mentor, and upright human being. I'll miss him a lot. utlinguistics.blogspot.com/2024/12/rip-...
utlinguistics.blogspot.com
RIP Bob Bayley
RIP Bob Bayley   We are so sad to learn that Dr. Robert Bayley , Professor Emeritus of Linguistics , UC Davis, and an associate member of t...
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UMassLinguistics @umasslinguistics.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Linguistics Careercast #podcast: With guest Carole Chaski, a forensic linguist. Her research has led to improvements in the methodology and reliability of stylometric analysis and inspired research on the use of this approach for authorship identification. www.linguisticscaree...
linguisticscareercast.com
Episode #61: Carole Chaski - Linguistics Careercast
"You need to have a heart of service to do this work" Carole Chaski is a forensic linguist who is considered one of the leading experts in the field. Her research has led to improvements in the methodology and reliability of computational linguistics and inspired research on the use of this approach for authorship identification.
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
sorry you make a good point I had no disagreement there. Just added a thought :)
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
a lot of ppl warned the industry that AI models are not ready to be deployed for high stakes tasks. They simply didn't listen. Many still don't listen or care. And it makes sense. the end game for a business is increasing revenue and profits not better decisions
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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Want to review for #CogSci2025? Click this thing. @cogscisociety.bsky.social docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
CogSci 2025 Call for Reviewers
CogSci is looking for abstract reviewers for the 2025 conference in San Francisco. If you are interested in this role, please complete the following form. If you have any questions, please contact cog...
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Yeah my bet would be that we just don't know. I also don't know what to make of a language having or not having a word for a concept. It seems like people make obvious inferences based on that information which to me seems not straightforward
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
I'd really doubt that claim can be properly substantiated. First, not having a word for X is hard to verify for a language. Second across many understudied languages with no written form! what's the book?
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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Don't miss the Nijmegen Lectures, a unique 3-day series of talks & discussion by renowned psychologists @fernandaedi.bsky.social & Victor Ferreira, Jan 7-9, 2025! Topics will span the psycholinguistic continuum from intention to articulation. More info & registration here: www.mpi.nl/events/nijme...
Black and white photographs of Victor Ferreira (left) and Fernanda Ferreira (right) who will be jointly giving the Nijmegen Lectures in January 2025.
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
that would be a good thread I'd think about it!
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
that's a great question. I gotta think about it for the ranking but a lot of early neural network papers and Chomsky's papers with Miller come to mind
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
needs to be on Bluesky too
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
There is so much really brilliant research from the 50-70s in cogsci and linguistics that is not being read or referenced anymore and I find that a real pity. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel or rediscover things we already know. Older literature should be actively read, taught, and discussed
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Eleanor Chodroff @echodroff.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
ASR systems are getting *really* good. But how do they actually compare to humans when the listening environment is challenging? In our JASA-EL paper led by Chloe Patman, we compare SoTA ASR systems in pub and speech-shaped noise and directly compare their performance against L1 English speakers
pubs.aip.org
Speech recognition in adverse conditions by humans and machines
In the development of automatic speech recognition systems, achieving human-like performance has been a long-held goal. Recent releases of large spoken language
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Our new paper “Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?” was just presented at #EMNLP2024! This is work led by Steven Feng, with Noah Goodman. arxiv.org/abs/2408.03617
arxiv.org
Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?
While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of t...
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Nora Beier @norabeier.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
AI voice assistants have become an integral part of many people's everyday life. Do people talk to AI as if it were another human? Read more about how speakers use prosody to focus important words when talking to AI devices in our new paper! psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
psycnet.apa.org
APA PsycNet
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
This is really well put! I'm gonna include it in my language acquisition lectures
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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
More than 150 years after it was written, this quote remains one of the best summaries of why geneticists should study #language. In just a handful of words, Charles Darwin perfectly captures the intertwining of nature and nurture that underpins this distinctive human capacity:
Photograph of Charles Darwin, with a quote next to it, taken from The Descent of Man, his book published in 1871. The quote reads: "Language is an art, like brewing or baking. It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; whilst no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write."
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
I somehow have developed adverse reaction to any quote with a nature background unfortunately so even this quote does not seem convincing at all :))
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
I just read "within minimalist program, case is a semantically uninterpretable feature on nominals" and it reminded me how counter-intuitive this is. Like it seems very obvious that case communicates meaning. pure syntactic treatment of it seems wrong. what am I missing?
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Linguischick @cocchino.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Hey! I'm teaching "Linguistics of Sign Languages" at the Linguistics Society of America's Summer Institute this summer (w/ Ryan Lepic). There are going to be so many great classes and instructors. I'd appreciate if you'd share this and send good students our way! center.uoregon.edu/LSA/2025/pro...
center.uoregon.edu
The Linguistics of Sign Languages
Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute
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Declan Campbell @thisisadax.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
(1) Vision language models can explain complex charts & decode memes, but struggle with simple tasks young kids find easy - like counting objects or finding items in cluttered scenes! Our 🆒🆕 #NeurIPS2024 paper shows why: they face the same 'binding problem' that constrains human vision! 🧵👇
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
wait you can't bookmark posts here?! how else would I create a list of cool papers I'll likely not have time to read?
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
oh damn! why did this instruction change everything :)))
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
I'm not seeing circles whatever I do and I'm going crazy :))))
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Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
I’m recruiting PhD students to join the Computational Minds and Machines Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle! Join us to work at the intersection of computational cognitive science and AI with a broad focus on social intelligence. (Please reshare!)
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Fernanda Ferreira @fernandaedi.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day, and I only wish my parents were around to take in this moment with me. My OUP book “Psycholinguistics: A Very Short Introduction” is now in the final proofs stage. Must be a lot of pollen in the air because I seem to be tearing up…
Copyright page generated by Oxford University Press for my upcoming book. The copyright is ©️Fernanda Ferreira 2025, and also states that “The moral rights of the author have been asserted.”
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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
🤖🧠 I'll be considering applications for postdocs & PhD students to start at Yale in Fall 2025! If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and AI, I encourage you to apply! Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_... PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Top: syntax tree for the sentence "the doctor by the lawyer saw the artist"
Bottom: a continuous vector
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
linguistics profs, literally
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Ryan Rhodes @langofmind.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Blue sky lets you play YouTube videos in the app?? Already so much better than twitter! Here's a video I made about the science and linguistics of one of my favorite movies - Arrival. Check it out! youtu.be/lIPi3OiaG3I
youtu.be
Can language change the way you think? [The Science of Arrival]
YouTube video by Language of Mind
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
oh amazing thanks!
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Masoud @langloglearn.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Is there a linguistics and language sciences starter pack here? Did I miss it?
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Colin Phillips @colinphillips.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Come join us in Oxford! Or encourage your friends to apply, so you can visit them here! We are looking to fill the Professorship in Language and Communication, a senior professor position. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... .
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