📢 Unhappy about peer review at NLP/ML conferences? Here's a chance to do smth about it, and get an interdisciplinary PhD! NLP+discrete optimization at @itu.dk
Project: interpretable methods for paper-reviewer matching
Apply by Jan 6 for position DC6: www.cords-dn.at
Master degree needed
@nlpnorth.bsky.social research group: nlpnorth.github.io
My lab & more details about the position: annargrs.github.io/lab/
What it's like to do a PhD at ITU: nlpnorth.github.io/content/phd-...
📢 Unhappy about peer review at NLP/ML conferences? Here's a chance to do smth about it, and get an interdisciplinary PhD! NLP+discrete optimization at @itu.dk
Project: interpretable methods for paper-reviewer matching
Apply by Jan 6 for position DC6: www.cords-dn.at
Master degree needed
i am looking for academic (or similarly "serious") courses or textbook-y texts on LLMs with a major component (lets say >66%) that is NOT about the technicalities of Transformers, optimization, RL, tokenization, etc, but instead focus more on data, eval, interpretability, etc. pointers?
Here's an argument that both 'confabulation' and 'hallucination' imply that something unusual happens and causes an error. But LLMs work exactly as designed, whether their output happens to be factually correct or not. Apparently, the technical term is 'bullshit'.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🙏 Many thanks to all the co-authors and respondents!
My favorite finding: even professionals who care about intelligence definitions enough to volunteer for a survey, find it hard to specify how they understand it - even as a multi-choice selection of pre-defined criteria.
/8
In light of the debate on 'AI' conferences, it is interesting that the respondents who identified their primary field as 'AI' were among the most skeptical about the current LLMs. This choice of the field name does not necessarily align with the research agenda of 'intelligent technology'.
/7
Finally, we asked the respondents about their overall research agenda. Most of them see their goal as adding to scientific knowledge, rather than building 'intelligent' tech. But those who do have the latter goal are also more likely to consider the current LLMs as intelligent.
/6
We also asked the respondents to categorize different entities as intelligent or not (see sec. 4.3 for rationale for this binarization). The number of respondents who made that choice for current LLMs (with ChatGPT as an example) is between those who made the same choice for amoebas and ants. /5
Here's how many respondents believe that the current and future LLM-based systems can be considered 'intelligent'. We found that students are overall less skeptical than the senior researchers. /4
Here's how many researchers considered various criteria of 'intelligence' important, but lacking in the current LLMs. Interestingly, embodiment isn't considered that important. /3
Here's who our respondents were by career stage, and which field they identified with as their primary research field: /2
🤯 We use the term 'intelligence' a lot, but wth do we mean?
We got 303 survey responses from researchers. The most agreed-on criteria are generalization, adaptability & reasoning.
ACL Findings preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.20959
with @brtrm.bsky.social @terne.bsky.social @heinrichst.bsky.social /1
Co-organized by Aalborg University, the IT University of Copenhagen, and the University of Copenhagen.
Team: @bjerva.bsky.social @delliott.bsky.social @annarogers.bsky.social and our amazing students incl. @arzuburcuguven.bsky.social @motzwanted.bsky.social /2
📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th!
- Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo)
- Exciting posters by other participants
Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1
Is there a term for the state of "killed yourself over last-minute conference submissions and now need a week to recover"?
Also, any strategies from group leaders who manage to prevent that?
That'd be great to check when we have the bandwidth. But one more way to think about this is the scaling of effort to detect who doesn't help enough, going through their rationales, begging them to do more, checking what happens, etc etc - in parallel to all other jobs. This has to be sustainable.
📢 Breaking changes to EMNLP submissions! If you plan to submit, pls make sure ALL co-authors know that:
- they have to register as reviewers by May 21st (can be done as soon as a paper is submitted)
- if they get assignments, it must be done on time and acc. to guidelines. Penalties now possible!
A screenshot from a legal complaint with contact information for the plaintiffs' attorneys that states, "Joseph R. Saveri (State Bar No. 130064) Cadio Zirpoli (State Bar No. 179108) Christopher K.L. Young (State Bar No. 318371) Kathleen J. McMahon (State Bar No. 340007) JOSEPH SAVERI LAW FIRM, LLP 601 California Street, Suite 1000 San Francisco, California 94108 Telephone: (415) 500-6800 Facsimile: (415) 395-9940 Email: jsaveri@saverilawfirm.com czirpoli@saverilawfirm.com cyoung@saverilawfirm.com kmcmahon@saverilawfirm.com Matthew Butterick (State Bar No. 250953) 1920 Hillhurst Avenue, #406 Los Angeles, CA 90027 Telephone: (323) 968-2632 Facsimile: (415) 395-9940 Email: mb@buttericklaw.com Counsel for Individual and Representative Plaintiffs and the Proposed Class"
A screenshot from a legal complaint that states, "UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA SAN FRANCISCO DIVISION Richard Kadrey, an individual; Sarah Silverman, an individual; Christopher Golden, an individual; Individual and Representative Plaintiffs, v. Meta Platforms, Inc., a Delaware corporation; Case No. Complaint Class Action Demand for Jury Trial Defendant."
IF YOU FOUND YOUR NOVEL IN THE LIBGEN DATABASE, YOU MAY BE A CLASS MEMBER FOR THE KADREY ET AL V. META PLATFORMS CLASS ACTION
Law firms you can contact if you're a potential class member:
Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP (415) 500-6800
Mathew Butterick (323) 968-2632 mb@buttericklaw.com
Researchers at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands have received a questionnaire from the US with questions that are an attack on academic freedom. The University of Leiden advises not to respond www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/announcement...
That's just insane! @naaclmeeting.bsky.social
Link to original report: www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...
And then they were systematically replaced. Russians and Ukrainians were incentivized to move to Crimea, creating the current Russian-speaking majority that considers Crimea 'historically theirs'.
One week left to apply!
Perks: a sane country with great infrastructure, healthcare, and biking lanes.
This guy, @albertburneko.bsky.social, is a genius. Please read his brilliant article on Elon Musk's deranged and morally repugnant Mars colonisation schtick. defector.com/neither-elon...
Finland is making a significant investment in the future of machine learning / artificial intelligence by hiring 20 professors (at various levels) www.ellisinstitute.fi/ellis-instit...
It was/is discussed by various groups, but it is really complex, and different places have different co-authorship cultures, and there are many other fires going on. For now, this option should at least enable big groups to better cover their share of reviewing.
I'm sure they exist. Not sure what ARR can do about them.
Also, nothing changed wrt exceptions, one can still ask to not review if e.g. all authors are new to the community. We just don't want the (frequent) situation in which established groups create more review work than they contribute.
I would bet that in such labs, peer review won't be the only such request. I think it's generally the idea that postdocs should gain mentoring/supervision experience, and PIs are supposed to take that into account when considering their workload.
