Rob Voigt

Screenshot of a figure with two panels, labeled (a) and (b). The caption reads: "Figure 1: (a) Illustration of messages (left) and strings (right) in toy domain. Blue = grammatical strings. Red = ungrammatical strings. (b) Surprisal (negative log probability) assigned to toy strings by GPT-2."

New work to appear @ TACL!

Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar.

Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings.

How can both things be true? 🧵👇

Tenure-track phonology position at UChicago!

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Sociology of Gender University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

UC Davis is looking to appoint a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07293

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

congrats - this looks really exciting and powerful Michael, looking forward to reading it!!

Four papers accepted at the #EMNLP2025 main conference!
1️⃣ Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?
2️⃣ Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models

In these two papers, we look into...

woohoo congrats!!

Robin Lakoff, Expert on Language and Gender, Is Dead at 82

“A woman using a public voice is in trouble.”

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/u...

UMich Ling is hiring for a cluster hire position in AI and Linguistics! Come work in a fabulous department with great grad students, supportive colleagues, and one overly school-spirited nut who will tell you where all the fun stuff is on campus.

apply.interfolio.com/171006

Leveraging Human Production-Interpretation Asymmetries to Test LLM Cognitive Plausibility Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingyi Wu, Rob Voigt. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). 2025.

I just gave a virtual presentation at ACL 2025 on our work about the production–interpretation asymmetry in reference processing in LLMs. If you’re into computational psycholinguistics or the LLMs x cognitive science space, give it a read!
aclanthology.org/2025.acl-sho...
@robvoigt.bsky.social

NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...

I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

wow this looks super cool!! excited to check it out.

congrats!!!

This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧵1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy

Cory Booker has taken the Senate floor and plans to filibuster as long as he’s physically able to protest the complete disregard for the rule of law by Trump and Musk.

Watch here: www.c-span.org/event/us-sen...

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

The shame of Columbia University In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny

The Shame of Columbia: violating academic freedom

“Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.”
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

Columbia Concedes to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.

The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

Looking for a PhD student to come work with me on the ethical implications of NLP from September!

Please share widely and point any interesting students my way! 😊

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Taser was a weapon company. Then it was a body camera company. Now it’s a body camera data company. @robvoigt.bsky.social and I look at some of the promises and challenges of applying natural language processing to BWC footage in a new article (1/5) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Are we paying too much for biomedical research? Trump's attack on NIH

Wonderful explainer on indirect costs by Dick Aslin open.substack.com/pub/dickasli...

Advancing the Scientific Study of Structural Racism: Concepts, Measures, and Methods This review provides ten actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conc...

What is structural racism, and how do we measure it?

@tyson-brown.bsky.social, @pahoman.bsky.social, and I have a forthcoming Annual Review article on @socarxiv.bsky.social. Check it before studying structural racism is banned (and follow Tyson and Trish, new to Bluesky). osf.io/6zbgh/

Major news:

Donald Trump has just issued a trans military ban, with much of the details left to Hegseth.

It states that being trans is incompatible with "an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle"

I know many military trans people who have served admirably for decades.

Shameful.

Postdoctoral position at @cornelluniversity.bsky.social, "from all areas of research that advance the state of the art in data science and the health sciences, extending the reach of data-driven research into novel medical application domains"

Happy to chat!

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29529

Frontiers | The sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling

New paper out today in Frontiers in AI!

The sociolinguistic foundations of language modelling

We argue sociolinguistics provides a foundation for understanding LLMs and addressing many challenges

www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

doi.org/10.3389/frai...

techxplore.com/news/2025-01...

Happy New Year everyone! Jim and I just put up our January 2025 release of Speech and Language Processing! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

CMU LTI is hosting predoc interns this summer, centered around "Language Technologies for All"! Please apply and circulate! lti.cs.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...

Our Summer 2025 Internship applications are now open! Note that positions are now open for high school through doctoral students!

All applications are due February 15, 2025, by 5 pm PST. All materials should be sent to Ms. Mia Harris at miaharris@stanford.edu

badlab.stanford.edu/summer-inter...