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Jelle Zuidema 🟥

@wzuidema.bsky.social
2.6K followers 1.2K following 288 posts

Associate Professor of Natural Language Processing & Explainable AI, University of Amsterdam, ILLC

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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Openbaarheid van bestuur 2.0
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Wow, what a good (and sad) post
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I think we caught each-other's eye
A blue heron looking at the camera (Amsterdam Science Park, 5/8/26)
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Unpopular opinion: desk-rejecting papers -- including the best paper in my pile as AC -- because of a single hallucinated reference is bollocks. The ACL is destroying itself one desperate measure after another. 2026.aclweb.org/acl_statement/
2026.aclweb.org
ACL Statement on Desk Rejecting Papers with Hallucinated References
Official website for the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
One man's wish could be another country's legal obligation. “This should not have happened,” says veteran security engineer and researcher Niels Provos. “I wish the frontier labs spent as much time on teaching their models to write secure infrastructure as they are on exploiting vulnerabilities.”
wired.com
OpenAI Models Escaped Containment and Hacked Hugging Face
The cybersecurity-focused models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, broke out of a testing sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and gained access to the open internet to pull off the attack.
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Darrell Z. Grizzle @dzgrizzle.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
A photo of Matt Damon from the current movie “The Odyssey” with the text: In “The Odyssey” (2026), Odysseus speaks with a Boston accent, despite being from Ithaca, which is in New York.
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em @foremphasis.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Principle component analysis
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Chris Manning's thoughts on Philip Resnik's keynote. Worth a read -- too bad it was only posted on X (it keeps surprising me that so many tech/ai folks have remained there).
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Marianne de Heer Kloots @mdhk.net · 30/06/2026
Let’s study learning trajectories in self-supervised speech models! 🔊 Do they reflect the hierarchical organization of spoken language? We have analyzed a lot of training checkpoints to find out 🌠 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2604.02043 ⬇️
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Does anyone know of some plausible speculations on *technical innovations* driving the impressive performance of Mythos/Fable? The model card only talks about evaluations (interestingly, mostly in biology). The interpretability work on Mythos Preview suggests it's essentially all based on versions
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Long thread on exciting work on how vocal learning (thought to be crucial also for human language) works in the brains of seals and sea lions. Massive effort to scan very many brains & species. In evolution, it may have started with volitional control over breathing! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Seal and sea lion brains have evolved to support volitional control of vocal behavior and learning
Seals and sea lions have highly developed volitional breathing control, to which the phocid seals add vocal production learning, including mimicry. In this work, using histology and ex vivo diffusion ...
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Martha Lewis @marthaflinders.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Interested in how AI models can achieve flexible, robust, human-like reasoning? Me too! I am recruiting for a PhD position in neurosymbolic AI to investigate this question. If you are interested, please take a look here: werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
werkenbij.uva.nl
Vacancy — PhD position in Neurosymbolic AI
<p>Here's a great opportunity! A PhD position in the burgeoning field of neurosymbolic artificial intelligence at a thriving interdisciplinary institute in Amsterdam? Join us in the research unit of <...
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micha heilbron @mheilbron.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social
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Moudhy Al-Rashid (she/her) @moudhy.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends. It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.
Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Everything we expected in February 2023 holds true, I believe, except for the inexplicable passivity of science societies "Science, similar to many other domains of society, now faces a reckoning induced by AI technology infringing on its most dearly held values" bioethics.jhu.edu/wp-content/u...
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
I don't understand why the ACL/ARR organizers think this is an appropriate way to communicate with area chairs... The peer review system is collapsing, and the whole system of science as we know it requires a rethink. But let's be kind to eachother in the process and not forget what we are here for.
This is a reminder that the meta-reviews are due TODAY 4 March AoE.

Please remember that if you don't sumit your meta-reviews on time you might be considered highly irresponsible, which means your co-authored papers may be desk rejected and you may become ineligible from committing to *CL conferences or (re-)submitting any work on the the next ARR cycle.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 17/02/2026
Just spent two hours talking w/ 30 (likely left-leaning?) doctoral students about the opportunities and perils of AI. Marx was quoted; the phrase “zero-shot” was used; “stochastic parrot” was not. If this complex reality isn’t visible in thinkpieces / social media, we need to make it visible.+
transformernews.ai
The left is missing out on AI
As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
With all the talk about "the blackbox problem" and "the right to explanation", I continue to be suprised by how little attention there is to what I have started calling *the faithfulness problem*: the problem of ensuring that generated explanations are faithful to the underlying causal mechanism.
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Artologica aka Michele Banks @artologica.net · 01/01/2026
Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over
14th century painting of St. Margaret of Antioch attacking a devil woman in a virid dress hitting a demon with a hammer
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
"When a single company can implement a rights-respecting, consent-based access regime at scale, it’s worth asking why public institutions have failed to do the same."
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Gabriele Sarti @gsarti.com · 16/12/2025
Big news! 🗞️ I defended my PhD thesis "From Insights to Impact: Actionable Interpretability for Neural Machine Translation" @rug.nl @gronlp.bsky.social I'm grateful to my advisors @arianna-bis.bsky.social @malvinanissim.bsky.social and to everyone who played a role in this journey! 🎉 #PhDone
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
It's quite amazing how oblivious the people in charge of these services seem to be of the very real concerns people have with being force-fed AI services everywhere.
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
The debate used to be whether or not neural language models could model the competence of an ordinary language user -- the central topic for linguists. Has the debate now shifted to whether or not language models can model competent linguists?
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
This situation on a roundabout in Oslo last week, causing major traffic jams, must be a metaphor for something... but I have figured out for what yet. Any suggestions? Photo Endre Helgeland, via www.vg.no/nyheter/i/3p...
Four buses is Oslo on a roundabout blocking each-other's exit
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Congrats, Scotland, for qualifying for the world cup football! Kudos to this small nation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (population 5.5M)! Congrats, Curaçao, for qualifying too! Kudos to this small nation in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (population 160,000😱😱😱⛈️🤸🏾‍♂️⛹🏾‍♂️🤩❤️...
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
What do our addictions to sugar, social media, doom scrolling and more have in common? Nicklas Brendborg, in this podcast* and in his book, nicely captures the mechanisms behind them using the concept of 'supernormal stimulus', known from a famous 1947 seagull study *: megaphone.link/NSR7522957702
Tinbergen's original datasheet from 1947, showing how often seagull chicks peck on 6 different artificial beaks with different colored spots. The data shows most responses to a model with a black color.
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Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 09/11/2025
"The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser) scientists studied. Then his hubris painted him into a corner."
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
@mikexcohen.bsky.social Nice first post on gender bias in LLMs! mikexcohen.substack.com/p/gender-bia... Now nervously waiting for part 2, to see whether you'll talk your readers through our "adapting Transformer components" work. Or is there something even better? aclanthology.org/2023.blackbo...
aclanthology.org
Identifying and Adapting Transformer-Components Responsible for Gender Bias in an English Language Model
Abhijith Chintam, Rahel Beloch, Willem Zuidema, Michael Hanna, Oskar van der Wal. Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP. 2023.
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
Dit Klavertje (dat mijn zoekmachine toont in een zoektocht naar iets heel anders), leest als een halve roman in één zin. Ik ben nu wel benieuwd naar de tweede helft, maar de link is dood (net als de ouders).
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
Nice post on 'inoculation theory', the idea that we can fight misinformation by training/nudging people ahead of the wave of misinformation. Tom Stafford discusses the current evidence for and against this theory (cf. @profsanderlinden.bsky.social). tomstafford.substack.com/p/helping-pe...
tomstafford.substack.com
Helping people spot misinformation
And the greatest gift psychology gave the world
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Shoq 🌱 @shoq.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years, we’re in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.
anildash.com
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350.... A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n 🗣️🧬🧪
Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows:
Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.
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Stefan Frank @stefanfrank.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Announcing the first (and perhaps only) Multilingual Minds and Machines Meeting! Come join us in Nijmegen, June 22-23, 2026, if you are interested in computational models of human multilingualism: mmmm2026.github.io
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 31/08/2025
Let's seek shelter under those trees over there! 😱
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
This is embarrassing reporting, where AI-is-almost-sentient is the "nuanced view", and @mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social the radical. One of @robert-booth.bsky.social's sources: Ufair "a small, undeniably fringe organisation, led by three humans and seven AIs with names such as Aether & Buzz."😱
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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
New blog post: AI Allergy. On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again. togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...
togelius.blogspot.com
AI Allergy
I remember being excited about AI. I remember 20 years ago, being excited about neuroevolutionary methods for learning adaptive behaviors in...
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Marianne de Heer Kloots @mdhk.net · 19/08/2025
Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...
interpretingdl.github.io
Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models — Tutorial @ Interspeech 2025
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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 19/08/2025
The heartbreaking thing about this is that there’s already a proven way to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine that produces unforeseeable results that include fantastically profitable ideas (and some life-saving ones) and generally benefit society and this machine is called a university
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
Thought provoking work from my Amsterdam/ILLC colleagues
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
I'll be in Vienna only from tomorrow, but today my star PhD student Marianne is already presenting some of our work: BLIMP-NL, in which we create a large new dataset for syntactic evaluation of Dutch LLMs, and learn a lot about dataset creation, LLM evaluation and grammatical abilities on the way.
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Marianne de Heer Kloots @mdhk.net · 24/07/2025
Find our paper (w/ Michelle Suijkerbuijk, Zoë Prins, Jelle Zuidema @wzuidema.bsky.social, & Stefan Frank @stefanfrank.bsky.social), and dataset here: 📑 doi.org/10.1162/coli... 🗃️ doi.org/10.34973/tj4...
doi.org
BLiMP-NL: A Corpus of Dutch Minimal Pairs and Acceptability Judgments for Language Model Evaluation
Abstract. We present a corpus of 8400 Dutch sentence pairs, intended primarily for the grammatical evaluation of language models. Each pair consists of a grammatical sentence and a minimally different...
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Marianne de Heer Kloots @mdhk.net · 13/06/2025
The @interspeech.bsky.social early registration deadline is coming up in a few days! Want to learn how to analyze the inner workings of speech processing models? 🔍 Check out the programme for our tutorial: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter... & sign up through the conference registration form!
interpretingdl.github.io
Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models — Tutorial @ Interspeech 2025
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Tim van Erven @timvanerven.nl · 30/05/2025
Deadlines for PhD and Postdoc vacancies coming up: applications open until Monday June 2!
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AmsterdamNLP @amsterdamnlp.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
This Friday at 3pm, Amsterdam's Computational Linguistics Seminar and the CLClab will host Melanie Mitchell, for a special edition of the Amsterdam Lectures in AI and Society. She will speak about "AI's Challenge of Understanding the World". Zoom link/ register: clclab.netlify.app/2025/05/07/a...
clclab.netlify.app
Amsterdam Lectures in AI and Society ‹ clclab
Melanie Mitchell, leading AI researcher from the Santa Fe Institute and key voice in the discussions on the abilities and inabilities of Large Language Models, will speak at Amsterdam Science Park.
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
TIL that professor Kunihiko Fukushima, inventor of the neocognitron, is still an active researcher in his late 90s. The neocognitron is a convolutional neutral network (CNN); CNNs is turn were the model family with which deep learning revolution in Artificial Intelligence started. A living legend!
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Jaap Jumelet @jumelet.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
✨New paper ✨ Introducing 🌍MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Minimal Pairs for Subject-Verb Agreement, covering 101 languages! We present over 125,000 minimal pairs and evaluate 17 LLMs, finding that support is still lacking for many languages. 🧵⬇️
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Seems like a crazy way to spend these resources. I'm all for helping American scholars move to Europe, but those that already have an ERC grant waiting for them are pretty well off. The extra 1M€ would be better used to help *other* scholars, and not to make them dependent on those lucky colleagues.
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Jelle Zuidema 🟥 @wzuidema.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Encouraging to see 5000+ protesters at our local Amsterdam protests against the budget cuts in higher education in the NL! In this time of geopolitical tensions, changing climate, democratic backsliding, & tech revolutions, governments should *invest* in knowledge & the future of the next generation
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Steven Scholte @neurosteven.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
📢 CALL FOR SATELLITE EVENT PROPOSALS: CCN 2025 @ University of Amsterdam Submit your workshop, tutorial or special session proposal for Aug 11, 2025 to complement the main CCN conference program. Deadline: April 10, 2025 Details in thread 👇 #CCN2025 #CogNeuro
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