Francesca Padovani

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) (Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

Thrilled to announce the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL) at ACL 2026 🎉 A new venue at the intersection of development linguistics × modern NLP, spearheaded by @fredashi.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social, and and outstanding team of colleagues!

A thread 🧵

We can’t wait to welcome you, over the coming months we’ll be gradually revealing more information about the amazing keynote speakers who will be presenting at the Academiegebouw next summer 🤫. Stay tuned! 🤗

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This year I’m part of the organizing team, and I’m incredibly excited to work on and plan this historic event for the linguistics community in Groningen and across Northern Europe.⁣

We are thrilled to officially announce the dates of the 46th edition of 𝗧𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗗𝗔𝗚! Save the date for 𝗧𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭𝟭–𝟭𝟮 💫⁣

📣 I'm hiring 📣
Post-doc position at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social as part of @rug.nl CIT Innovation Fun "A3i – Artificial Intelligence Innovation Identifier"

Full call is available here: lnkd.in/esdQ7YGD
📅 Application deadline: Jan. 15 2026

Natural Language Processing How do you build Large Language Models? How do humans experience Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in their daily lives? And how can we...

👀 Look what 🎅 has broght just before Christmas 🎁: a brand new Research Master in Natural Language Processing at @facultyofartsug.bsky.social @rug.nl

Program: www.rug.nl/masters/natu...

Applications (2026/2027) are open! Come and study with us (you will also learn why we have a 🐮 in our logo)

The Multilingual Minds & Machines Meetings call for abstracts is now open! Everything you need to know is here -> mmmm2026.github.io

It was wonderful to continue our personal and professional exchange outside the walls of the department and with other colleagues! Thanks for stopping by :)

Then at our weekly @gronlp.bsky.social Reading Group she talked about “𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡?”, which is also part of an ongoing research project. 📊

Marianne presented her work on “𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬” at the monthly edition of the Linguistic Lunch I organize in our CLCG department.

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a fantastic friend and researcher, @mdhk.net , who came to visit us in Groningen for a couple of days from Amsterdam! 🎉

Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop will be co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca!🌴Stay tuned for more details!✨
@byungdoh.bsky.social Tatsuki Kuribayashi @grambelli.bsky.social Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Ryo Yoshida @cmclworkshop.bsky.social

📣 Save the date 🗓️ to present your exciting statistical learning research at the 6th Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning Conference June 10-12 2026 in San Sebastián 🇪🇸

Keynotes by
@jennysaffran.bsky.social
@noranewcombe.bsky.social
@pyoudeyer.bsky.social

More info to follow #IASL26

Breaking: we release a fully synthetic generalist dataset for pretraining, SYNTH and two new SOTA reasoning models exclusively trained on it. Despite having seen only 200 billion tokens, Baguettotron is currently best-in-class in its size range. pleias.fr/blog/blogsyn...

Interested in developmentally plausible LMs, and the role of child-directed language data?

Come to our poster TODAY (Fr 7 Nov, 10.30-12.00) #EMNLP!

Thrilled to be heading to Suzhou with a big team of GroNLP'ers 🐮

Interested in Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource LMs? Don't miss our posters & talks #EMNLP2025!

...ii) a direct quality reward from a teacher model, and iii) a reward based on the log probabilities of a teacher model (and its dialogue continuations). While these rewards did not improve our models performance, two different DPO approaches did!

Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning) Francesca Padovani1∗ Bastian Bunzeck2∗ Manar Ali2 Omar Momen2 Arianna Bisazza1 Hendrik Buschmeier2 Sina Zarrieß2 1Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), University of Groningen 2CRC 1646 – Linguistic Creativity in Communication, Bielefeld University f.padovani@rug.nl bastian.bunzeck@uni-bielefeld.de

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or doubts :)
Every contribution is more than welcome! 🙏😍

These are living datasets that researchers around the world can enrich as new resources become available
On the website of the project babylm.github.io/babybabellm/
you can find information about the dataset creation pipeline, training, and evaluation.

This was made possible thanks to the dedication of each language-specific expert and the coordination of senior researchers, @jumelet.bsky.social and @lchoshen.bsky.social among others.

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪

Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉

arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

This was made possible thanks to the dedication of each language-specific expert and the coordination of senior researchers, in particular @jumelet.bsky.social ! 🤩

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 | Universiteit Utrecht Universiteit Utrecht

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025

cpl2025.sites.uu.nl

When: December 18–19, 2025

Where: Utrecht, the Netherlands

Abstract submission deadline: June 15, 2025

Organizers: Jakub Dotlačil, Lena Jäger, Bruno Nicenboim, Ece Takmaz

Jane Goodall (1934-2025) 🤍

My very first book review is out now 📚
Muchas gracias to @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for inviting me, looking forward to our next project(s) 😇

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐂 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 (𝐄𝐑𝐂 𝐂𝐨𝐆, 𝐏𝐈 𝐀𝐧𝐚 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐟) 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫! ⁣🎉
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We have an opening for a 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 for a starting duration of 12 months extendible to 30 months.⁣

For further details -> www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀’ 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻! 😍
Here are some photos of our GroNLP station at the Forum, where we welcomed high school classes and potential future researchers. 🧑‍🔬🤖
Quizzes, puzzles, demos, card games, and of course, lots of chocolate! 🍫

Thanks to the entire CIRM team and the @ilcb.bsky.social for organizing this truly special week !