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Opening up ChatGPT: Evidence-based measures of openness and transparency in...
With the first excitement of ChatGPT dying down, people are catching up on the risk of relying on closed and proprietary models that may stop being supported overnight or may change in undocumented...
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Pitfalls of fossil-thinking: a peer review II
This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint. The first part is here. I ended that post by noting I wasn’t sure all preprint authors were aware of the public...
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Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on
There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact...
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How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?
Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in...
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Interactive repair and the foundations of language
We have a new paper out in which we argue that the robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is normally thought of as a kind of remedial...
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Language between animals and computers
Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps the one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to...
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What are the most frequent interjections?
Out now in Annual Review of Linguistics: Interjections at the Heart of Language. This paper presents a take on interjections that departs in significant ways from received views. I would be very happy...
View ArticleThe inverse grazing goat problem of linguistics
A common trope in recreational mathematics is the grazing goat problem (see this lovely write-up in Quanta). Briefly, there’s a goat tethered to a rope, and the problem is to determine the area it...
View ArticleFutures of Language, 2024-2029
I am extremely happy to announce that NWO will be funding the project Futures of Language over the next five years. We will start in September 2024; stay tuned for news about positions for postdocs,...
View ArticleI am a stochastic parrot
Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, writes: To liken the mountain to a man and talk of its “humor” or “rage” does little harm. But to liken the man to the mountain proposes that all human...
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