Suhas Arehalli

New work from Me, @tallinzen, and @linguistbrian to appear at CoNLL: arxiv.org/abs/2210.12187 Q: LM surprisal underestimates garden path effects. Is surprisal a bad theory of processing, or are LM estimates of surprisal just misaligned with human prediction? 🧵below:

I am hoping to hire a postdoc who would start in Fall 2024. If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and AI, I encourage you to apply! Please see this link for details: rtmccoy.com/prospective_po…

🧙‍♀️ I'm hoping to recruit ~1 PhD student this cycle through @BULinguistics! Students who are broadly interested in meaning and computational models would be a good fit. I'll mention a few specific topics I've been working on & looking to expand below:

I am at #ACL2024 and will be presenting joint work with @forrestdavis at the TeachingNLP workshop. The talk is on Aug 15 11:45 am in Lotus Suite 11. I would also love to grab coffee or meals with folks to chat about computational psycholing, SLACs, or life generally.

Can LMs serve as cognitive models of human language processing? Humans make syntactic agreement errors ("the key to the cabinets are rusty"). @sArehalli and I tested if the errors documented in six human studies emerge in LMs. They... sometimes did. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/d…

📣 New paper from @CognitionJourn on modeling of locality effects in sentence comprehension using CCG. The proposed model nicely accounts for crosslinguistic facts and fits well to reading times from an English corpus! Free version (until May 26): authors.elsevier.com/a/1itqQ2Hx2xKq8

My paper (with Pavel Logacev) is out! doi.org/10.1080/232737… We tested case syncretism and its effects in Turkish agreement attraction. Unlike what is predicted by cue-based retrieval models, we (N=118) found no effect of case syncretism on the magnitude of the attraction.

Excited to present some ongoing work at PLC48 tomorrow (Session 3A), where we test the types of morpho-phonological generalizations RNNs may form over limited training data 🤖 Joint work w/ @icoson and Paul Smolensky

A bit late, but I'll be at #HSP2024 this year! Alongside some incredible coauthors (@psydock112 @sArehalli @grushaprasad @linguistbrian @tallinzen), I'll be presenting a poster about which eye tracking measures LM surprisal does and doesn't explain in garden path sentences.

Think you have a model that can explain the precise magnitude of the effects we find? The best part is that the 2000 person dataset is publically available, so you can see for yourself!

Do any (psycho)linguistics folks know of any summer research opportunities in the US available to non-citizens? I have an amazing student who wants to get some hands on experience at a larger institution, but most opportunities seem tied to NSF REU funding.

I (as well as @a_stadt, @weGotlieb, @LChoshen) will present the findings of the BabyLM Challenge on Dec. 7, 3:30 at CoNLL! Come see the high-level findings, as well as talks from the award-winning BabyLMs 👶

I'm really excited to be presenting this work at #EMNLP2023 and at @BlackboxNLP in Singapore this week! Come stop by my poster/message me if you're interested in the topic or more generally about anything at the compling x cogsci intersection.

My colleagues and I are accepting applications for PhD students at Yale. If you think you would be a good fit, consider applying! Most of my research is about bridging the divide between linguistics and artificial intelligence (often connecting to CogSci & large language models)

Language models are superhuman - How can we make them into more humanlike cognitive models? In a new #EMNLP2023 Findings paper w/ @tallinzen we show that LMs with limited memory retrieval capacity pattern like humans in agreement+semantic attraction arxiv.org/abs/2310.16142 (🧵)

Honored my paper with @psresnik was accepted to Findings of #EMNLP2023! Many psycholinguistics studies use LLMs to estimate the probability of words in context. But LLMs process statistically derived subword tokens, while human processing does not. Does the disconnect matter? 🧵

In our new paper out today at @TrendsCognSci , @leylaisi and I argue that social interaction perception is a visual process--computed by the visual system and distinct from higher-level cognitive processes. tinyurl.com/nhh2dhxt