Cara Leong

linguistics phd student @ nyu, machine acquisitionist/trainer of models, monday crossword finisher (she/her)

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@tallinzen @xuanalogue non-native speakers when their linguistics professors ask them for acceptability judgments 🫠

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@tallinzen this isn’t tal! please dont click the link

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@lambdaviking @lltjuatja excuse me what

[Byung-Doh Oh @byungdoh]

Submissions for the 2025 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics are due Feb. 16

I humbly request your help with spreading the word

[Alex Warstadt @a_stadt]

👶NEW PAPER🪇

Children are better at learning a second language (L2) than adults. In a new paper (led by the awesome Ionut Constantinescu) we ask:
1. "Do LMs also have a 'Critical Period' (CP) for language acquisition?" and
2. "What can LMs tell us about the CP in humans?"

[Najoung Kim 🫠 @najoungkim]

tinlab at Boston University (with a new logo! 🪄) is recruiting PhD students for F25 and/or a postdoc! Our interests include meaning, generalization, evaluation design, and the nature of computation/representation underlying language and cognition, in both humans and machines. ⬇️

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@xuanalogue dark laksa sounds rly cursed tbh

[Kanishka Misra 🌊 @kanishkamisra]

🧐🔡🤖 Can LMs/NNs inform CogSci? This question has been (re)visited by many people across decades.

@najoungkim and I contribute to this debate by using NN-based LMs to generate novel experimental hypotheses which can then be tested with humans!

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@kanishkamisra long live cookie

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@jowenpetty use your research funds to get a blackboard for the office

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@JulieKallini @isabelpapad @rljfutrell @kmahowald @ChrisGPotts Congrats on the paper (and the color palette)!!!

[Brenden Lake @LakeBrenden]

Cara is presenting her paper today (poster P1-E-27), asking whether LLMs can simulate expertise effects just by telling the system "you are an expert in birds" or "an expert in dogs". Check it out! https://t.co/HXpyH93xhs #CogSci2024

[Aaron Mueller @amuuueller]

What is cause and effect? What is a “mechanism”? And how do answers to these questions affect interpretability research?

📜 New preprint! 📜 Two key challenges for causal/mechanistic interpretability, and ways forward. To be presented at the mech interp workshop at #ICML2024:

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@kanishkamisra @lambdaviking @lltjuatja eat the pickles out of a ball jar

[Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald]

This work is a great example of how un-blackbox-like and linguistically interesting language models can be when the training data is manipulated!

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@katiedimartin 😂😂

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@kanishkamisra wow spoiler alert

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

high praise from someone who trained a whopping ninety LMs (read https://t.co/IK9TouMyCA!)

[Kanishka Misra 🌊 @kanishkamisra]

Such a well executed paper! Can totally feel the feeling of training a whopping 125 LMs (but def worth it!)

[Cara Leong @craaaa]

@katiedimartin need to cover your bases so that you get retweets on your paper thread