Prof. Evelina Leivada @EvelinaLeivada Twitter profile

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

25 days

🍾New preprint just out, following a 3-year-long brewing! Almost all theories of bilingual cognition recognize the role of language distance in modulating cognitive control or in affecting language processing. Yet, nobody really knows how to measure distance in global way! 1/7

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

24 days

@PlakiasNikos @mkaristianou Eσείς κε. Πλακιά πως μπορείτε; Διαφωνείτε με τις δράσεις του συλλόγου; Δεκτό. Δεν επροσωπείστε εκεί και δεν σας εκπροσωπεί. Εσείς όμως θέλετε να έχετε δικαίωμα λόγου σε έναν σύλλογο που δεν σας εκπροσωπεί. Ε, δεν γίνεται. Λέγεται δημοκρατία.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Is it possible that I'm seriously asked to choose between caring for my preterm baby and keeping my grant? Really, is it? Here's a story of what #WomenInScience often have to endure in silence. Not this time. Please share. Please help dispel the silence.

The day I was asked to choose between caring for my preterm baby and my job in academia

There are stories that you would prefer to never hear. Perhaps this is one of them, especially if you are a mother in academia or if you…

medium.com

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

10 months

They have been fed mountains of (copyrighted) data, sure, but still LLMs can't reliably track entities in simple discourse. A super simple passive sentence is enough. That much for "knowing more"!

Sherpa

@LLMSherpa

10 months

@GaryMarcus He didn't say it was better at scientific reasoning; he said it knew more than you, which it objectively does. Call me when you've read everything crawled by CC, 20 times.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

🔔Can #ArtificialInteligence apps understand the world behind words? New experiment with @GaryMarcus , @ElliotMurphy91 & Fritz Günther. We tested humans & LLMs in a new domain: the ability to read leet code. Results: HUM4NS C4N UNDERST4ND THIS BUT LLMs 4PP4RENTLY C4N'T! Why? 1/2

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 months

🔔Call for 3 postdoc positions associated with my project TURING (The Language Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Applications) is now open! More info Apply here . Deadline 31 July. Location: Beautiful Barcelona, but flexible😎

3 Post-Doctoral Researcher positions (2024DILIFRUA119) | EURAXESS

Job position 3 Post-Doctoral Researcher positions Job position requirements (skills/languages/required experience)

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Big, wonderful news! Super happy to announce that I got my DREAM job! In 2 weeks I join the @icreacommunity as a full Research Professor at @CLT_uab ! To those who helped/taught/worked with me over the years, THANK YOU!🙏And now your girl is off for bubbles! Cheers!🥳 #Lingtwitter

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Our #ΟΑ article is out @CambridgeCore ! #Bilingualism with minority languages. We discuss monolingual norms, native-speakerism, the quest for testing specific profiles & the use of powerful narratives that evoke problematic labels/ableist terminology.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Today we heard the baby's heartbeat for the first time and the tears keep falling! It's my 3rd pregnancy, but I have only one child. I cross fingers that we make it this time!🤞🥰

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Since #linguistics twitter is so hyped about grammaticality judgments, some shameless self-advertizing is due. It's not grammaticality judgments, it's acceptability judgments, and these two scales don't always coincide.

Frontiers | Acceptable Ungrammatical Sentences, Unacceptable Grammatical Sentences, and the Role of...

A search for the terms “acceptability judgment tasks” and “language” and “grammaticality judgment tasks” and “language” produces results which report finding...

www.frontiersin.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

@UnSrdeBarcelona @MakeSpaceforGi1 @architektoniczk When you say natural behaviors, do you mean that nature dictates them? Or that society promotes them? I'd be interested in facts not opinions too.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

My story @eldiarioes . Gracias @martaborraz #SinCienciaNoHayFuturo Las ayudas del Ministerio de Ciencia que hacen a Evelina elegir entre cuidar a su hija prematura o acabar su investigación

Las ayudas del Ministerio de Ciencia que hacen a Evelina elegir entre cuidar a su hija prematura o...

Los cinco años de duración de las ayudas para contratos Ramón y Cajal pueden alargarse bajo algunas circunstancias, pero no es el caso de la reducción de jornada que esta mujer, madre de una bebé que...

www.eldiario.es

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

SUPER excited about our new preprint! @vittoria_vd , @GaryMarcus , @ElliotMurphy91 & I examine what happens with language when Large Language Models are pushed beyond their training data 💣. Short thread👇1/8

Testing AI on language comprehension tasks reveals insensitivity...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are recruited in applications that span from clinical assistance and legal support to question answering and education. Their success in specialized tasks has led to...

arxiv.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Cuando publiqué mi historia, no sabía que quería lograr. Supongo que quería ser escuchada y desahogarme. Pero mira, hemos conseguido un cambio importante! Y hoy canto victoria! Gracias @DianaMorantR @ZulemaAltam #womeninSTEM

La Ley de Ciencia deja de penalizar a los investigadores con contrato temporal que cojan permisos...

El caso de una mujer que tuvo una hija prematura y enferma impulsó una enmienda en la norma que amplía los supuestos por los que estos contratos de duración determinada pueden prorrogarse, entre...

www.eldiario.es

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

It´s not an amazing time to work in the cogn science of language. You read that your work "HAS TOTALLY FALLEN TO PIECES". Does it matter that this is not what @_jennhu et al find re our PNAS paper? No. And labeling people as generative or non-generative. Truly necessary? 1/2

steven t. piantadosi

@spiantado

9 months

It is an amazing time to work in the cognitive science of language. Here are a few remarkable recent results, many of which highlight ways in which the critiques of LLMs (especially from generative linguistics!) have totally fallen to pieces.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

My latest article appeared @inferencereview . It's an article I've been told to not publish until I get tenure. But I did bc proving ourselves wrong as quickly as possible is the only way to progress. (I didn't say that. Richard Feynman did.) Happy reading!

Misused Terms in Linguistics

Evelina Leivada argues that an effort to improve the terminological clarity and coherence of theoretical and experimental linguistics is long overdue.

inference-review.com

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

@UnSrdeBarcelona @MakeSpaceforGi1 @architektoniczk Scientist during many years. Confirmation bias.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

I´ve been quite silent on twitter recently. For a reason. I just updated my CV, adding the section Career Breaks to explain my productivity drop(s) in 20-21. Only a few lines, but they took me days to write. 1/4 👇

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

📢Article out in @SpringerNature Humanities & Soc Sci Communications!🥳 I identify & explain the cognitive biases behind the most viral #linguistic universal: the order of adjectives. Key notions: Zipf's law, Ambiguity Intolerance, Novel Information Bias.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

As editor I always feel uncomfortable when a reviewer says that it shows that Eng is not the author's native language. Especially when the article has been proofread, but the reviewer thinks that the writing doesn't flow. What a privilege it must be to write without this worry.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 months

People, stop tweeting that Noam Chomsky has passed away unless you have credible internal information. Bill said that Mary said that a colleague in MA said is not good. No news site confirms the news. Let's be respectful.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

@GaryMarcus @ElliotMurphy91 Short explanation: LLMs lack grounded cognition; fixed associations between words & word vectors don't entail grasping the concepts behind words. Long explanation: Preprint updated with an experimental component that tests LLMs in a novel way! 2/2

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Often #WomenInScience don't talk about these experiences. Sometimes we´re advised to not talk about them. Today, as I look into the eyes of my precious daughter Alba, I feel her strength, and I'm breaking my silence. 4/4

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Today is one of the days that I lose faith in #science and #academia . A thread. A promising new journal on #language development rejected our work. On grounds of scope. After months of review. After asking for and getting major revisions. After both the 1st action editor and 1/5

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

@Soupiera Τι λέτε τώρα. Σε πιλοτικά προγραμμάτα του εξωτερικού, στις αίθουσες τοκετών υπάρχουν ως και ναργιλέδες. Το να παίζει και το ε ντε λα μαγκέτ ντε Βοτανίκ είναι ακόμα προαιρετικό, αλλά φαίνεται να επιδρά επίσης θετικά στην υγεία των νεογνών.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Does #bilingualism confer robust positive & negative effects? Studies & meta-analyses are mixed. Why? Our answer was just published, and in it, we tackle the critical question of why the results seem to tell a different story depending on who's narrating.👇

On trade-offs in bilingualism and moving beyond the Stacking the Deck fallacy | Bilingualism:...

On trade-offs in bilingualism and moving beyond the Stacking the Deck fallacy - Volume 26 Issue 3

www.cambridge.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Hey #linguistics twitter. I´ll probably repent this thread, but here it goes. @spiantado and Yuan Yang wrote an excellent paper. I agree with its results and I partly agree with its conclusions. What worries me, however, is the framing. In the 1st tweet of the thread below 1/5

steven t. piantadosi

@spiantado

3 years

I am sooooooo excited for this paper. We've spent years developing a super fast program induction library. We use it to learn key pieces of language structure. So much of what Chomskyan linguists say about learnability is totally wrong. 🧵

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

10 months

🥳Fantaaastic news!👇The #Consolidaci ónInvestigadora ⁦results are out and @AgEInves funded my project TURING (The Language Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Applications) with ca. 340K!! Elated for this new adventure! Stay tuned, I'll be soon hiring 2 or 3 post-docs.

Agencia Estatal de Investigación

@AgEInves

10 months

‼️ La @AgEInves publica la Propuesta de Resolución Provisional de la convocatoria 2023 de ayudas para incentivar la consolidación investigadora. ➡️

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

New preprint with our (w. @isabel_oltra ) star PhD students and @cofundURV fellows @masullo_camilla & @vittoria_vd : A systematic MEGA-review of 368 studies, 474 experiments, and 109K participants! Where do #bilingual adaptations on cognition stem from? 1/5

73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic...

Being bilingual confers certain behavioral adaptations. The two ongoing discussions that surround their occurrence concern the type of the effect and its origin. The former can be analyzed in terms...

osf.io

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Again we see terms like 'Chomskyan linguistics', 'Chomsky-esque science', 'Chomsky army'. As a female scholar whose work has been *mis*characterized this way, I don't particularly enjoy when my work is linked to someone's else (always a senior male) name.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

I spent most of the sleepless nights of my maternity leave preparing the project ATOM (Adaptations to Multilingualism)! Happy to see it was selected for funding! 😍

Agencia Estatal de Investigación

@AgEInves

2 years

‼️ La @AgEInves publica la propuesta de resolución provisional de la convocatoria Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento 2021. 3.079 ayudas a proyectos propuestos para financiación. 🔗

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

GREAT NEWS! As a #RYC I couldn't extend my grant to take care of a minor with health conditions. Now this changes, as the new #LeyDeLaCiencia makes provisions for cases like mine. An important positive step! Gracias @ZulemaAltam @DianaMorantR 🤩👏

Zulema Altamirano A

@ZulemaAltam

2 years

@EvelinaLeivada Dear Evelina, I am glad to inform you that yesterday the new Science Act was approved and cases as yours are explicitly protected: ➡️Art.21/22 include prorrogue/suspension of contract for any caring situation A step ahead for work-life balance in research, thanks to your case 💜

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

New paper with @ElliotMurphy91 and @GaryMarcus online! DALLE 2 has been widely celebrated as showing sophisticated #linguistic abilities. Yet, an analysis of its outputs reveals that it fails to perform above chance in a range of syntactic conditions.👉

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

And that's me being mansplained and called "honey". In public. By a fellow academic I don't know. Work hard, he says. Read my CV, you'll know what hard work looks like!

Riccardo VECELLIO SEGATE

@r_vecellio_s

3 years

@EvelinaLeivada @IrisVanRooij Don’t speak about anyone’s alleged privilege before knowing their lives, honey ☺️ Work hard, stop with excuses.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

💥New paper out in @SciReports with @vittoria_vd and @masullo_camilla !💥Contrary to widespread belief, we find that bilingual advantages and bilingual disadvantages go hand in hand. And this happens for a reason (i.e. cognitive trade-offs).

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

To sum up, if I disagree with a claim X in your work, I don't dismiss the value of your work, I don´t question you as a scholar, I don´t reject your theory/framework in its entirety, and I don´t forfeit the right to agree with another claim Z in your work. Paz🤠

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

⚠️Verdict returned: Not all critiques of LLMs have fallen into pieces (yet?)! Summarizing thread, fresh results, a short response (), a long response () & a plot twist. 👀 1/20

Reply to Hu et al.: Applying different evaluation standards to humans vs. Large Language Models...

Reply to Hu et al.: Applying different evaluation standards to humans vs. Large Language Models overestimates AI performance

www.pnas.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Today it´s two years since my first daughter Agape was born sleeping. I haven´t seen her, the state doesn´t even recognize her existence because she was born at 20 weeks of gestation. She never existed for this world. Except she did. Today we raise our glass to Agape.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Paula Badosa, I hope you're better in tennis than in linguistics, because Catalan is a language. Dunno, I'd feel ashamed to casually reveal such a profound ignorance of the linguistic reality of the place I was born and brought up.

Pol Molina Grífols

@mol_polina

2 years

Terrible que una persona que ha viscut la majoria de la seva vida a Barcelona i València digui sense cap mena de pudor que "el català no és una llengua". És un exemple d'ignorància terrible. Vergonya, @paulabadosa

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

@_jennhu @spiantado @vittoria_vd as a tenured professor to talk like this publicly about the work of a young researcher that hasn´t even defended her dissertation. I´d like to think I´d be more sensitive, more careful, more gentle. Less labeling and more caramaderie would be great for all of us. 3/3

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

Our latest article with @masullo_camilla & @vittoria_vd on the sociolinguistic vs. cognitive origin of bilingual adaptations is just out in Bilingualism: Language & Cognition @CambridgeCore ! And it's Open Access and Open Materials. 🥳

73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic...

73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic factors: A systematic review - Volume 27 Issue 3

www.cambridge.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

A @Nature editor invited me & 2 scholars to submit a short commentary on LLMs in Nov. We submitted in June. They've been sitting on it for 2 months! Today they rejected it "bc it's no longer Nov 22". Sorry we took time to work on this folks! Also I was on pregnancy leave! My bad.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

What about LLMs?🧐We tested their ability to process grammatical illusions, semantic anomalies & complex nested hierarchies. Short answer: Even the much praised next-word prediction abilities of LLMs face issues of robustness, when pushed beyond training data. 6/8

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

In one of my very first talks, when I was still an undergrad, a senior & famous ling professor fell asleep. Fine by me. He then woke up from the clapping & asked questions that referred to specific points of the talk! That's the closest I've ever been to paranormal activity!👽

Tara S

@t_stubbs

4 years

@Duncan_Wilson78 This is wonderful. I once chaired a lecture (which is perhaps more embarrassing?) where a senior lady fell asleep, and woke up shouting 'rice pudding' in the middle of the lecture - only for the speaker to say, 'please leave your questions til the end'... Mortifying.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

📌What kind of theories does #Minimalism involve? 📌Are data from a single person good enough? 📌Does generative #linguistics fare better than other branches of psychology by virtue of being less interested in stats? @KKGrohmann & I have some answers 👇

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

*Always*. Because, you know, Chomsky has been a groundbreaking figure in the field of LLM research for decades, but alas his experiments in this field never quite fooled us: deep down, we always knew. This framing does injustice to the v. good paper by Kallini et al. 1/2

Pascale Fung

@pascalefung

2 months

We always knew that Chomsky was wrong about language models, it’s nice to have a paper showing you just how wrong he was! #ACL2024 best papsr.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

You know what's missing from the Piantadosi list of remarkable results? This by @celestekidd & @Abebab . Perhaps that's a good candidate for critiques of LLMs that haven't fallen into pieces? Extra points if the critique comes from non-generative linguists.

How AI can distort human beliefs

Models can convey biases and false information to users

www.science.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

Oh no!! The burden of proof lies on the one making the claim. If you say LLMs understand language, you need to defend this position. It's not on critics to prove otherwise. That's the fallacy of appealing to ignorance.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

No, ChatGPT does not have theory of mind. (It doesn't have a mind either, but that's for another day.) I just asked it what it would expect to find in a box that has the label 'paper' but that Ann opened and saw that is full of chocolates, and it said paper.

Kevin Fischer

@KevinAFischer

2 years

This paper is not receiving enough attention: GPT 3.5 displays emergent theory of mind

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

10 months

@sodalitatum AI is confused because it knows how ασπάζομαι behaves in Ancient Greek? Surprising, given how bad it is in modern Greek. Cypriot and Standard.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

My last article, just published OA in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, discusses the mid-level generalizations of generative #linguistics . What are they? What´s their cognitive basis? How robust are they from an experimental point of view? Some answers👇

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

If you "ask reviewers to submit their review report within 7 days" in the middle of August, without even a personalized email, no surprise you don´t find reviewers.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

The effect of #bilingualism on cognition is a heated topic. Some studies find robust effects, others don´t. Why? Jason Rothman @lab_polar , @MaritWestergaa1 , @jdunabeitia & I discuss this in an article just published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition!

On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (How) should we proceed?...

On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (How) should we proceed? - Volume 24 Issue 1

www.cambridge.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

@ToLizaki21 @Chandlers_Duck Σε οργανωμένες κοινωνίες με πρόνοιες για τους νέους γονείς, δεν χρειάζεσαι "βοήθεια από γονείς" (aka πως να φορτώσεις κουρασμένους ανθρώπους με ένα νήπιο που τρέχει ασταμάτητα, σακατεύοντας την μέση τους). Η απουσία κράτους πρόνοιας είναι έκδηλη νομίζω.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

7 months

I recommend Kallini et al, so I agree on this one. But I wonder: Is it good practice to treat scientific work as a student essay? Criticism? Sure. Write a proper reply, a thread, a blog. This school-type marking that transpires a "I fixed for you" air is not promoting dialogue.

Christopher Potts

@ChrisGPotts

7 months

I know I am late in the project cycle for this, but I do have suggested edits for the team behind My overall comment is that the central claims in the original are lacking in empirical support.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

Being on high risk pregnancy leave means I must spend a good part of the day lying down. Good books keep good company, and I can't recommend @JWGrieve & Helena Woodfield's The Language of Fake News highly enough!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

Partly inspired by a Data Colada post, I published a paper that casts some doubt on the results of a very well-known study in #bilingualism . Now the journal wants to remove it from the Special Issue it appears in for well no reason. Here's a funny story!

Barbara Streisand meets Data Colada: The story of what happened post-publication after I revisited…

Disclaimer: In recent days, we have seen scholars suing other scholars, demanding no less than $25M (25 millions, let this number sink!) in…

medium.com

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

AI, big data, deep learning, language and cognition. A fantastic talk by @GaryMarcus at @UPFBarcelona !

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

of any. I know people that agree with some of Chomsky´s claims & disagree with others. Using a binary Chomskyan/non Chomskyan label is not useful & not capturing the voices of many of us. Let´s find a way to integrate these voices into a dialogue that does not use binary labels.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Excellent piece! This thinking is pervasive in smaller fields like #linguistics . An editor once wrote me "We don't *usually* publish critical replies". Meaning: We won't take this from you, female junior scholar, but if Famous Linguist sent sth similar, we'd happily consider it.

Andrew Gelman et al.

@StatModeling

3 years

“While critique is certainly an important part of improving scientific fields, we do not want to set a precedent or encourage submission of articles that only critique the methods used by others.”

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Attention all units! Before you put Chomsky's name on a paper that claims that Universal Grammar is dead *because of LLMs*, let's ask an LLM what it thinks, especially if you believe it has really cracked the language threshold, hence it can opine on the matter. 😺

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

I read tweets about #WomenInScience and #GenderEquality with great interest, as I'm signing the documents to reduce my working hours to 30% *without having the possibility to extend my grant*, effectively being punished for wanting to be both a #scientist and a #mother . Cheers.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

Interested in a PhD in linguistics? Come work with us @rollingURV ! @isabel_oltra & I have 2 Martí i Franquès COFUND positions available, one on language processing & the bilingual mind and one on grammar, grammaticality and acceptability. Pls RT!

www.urv.cat

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

Submitted to a journal with big IF. They: Out of scope. Me: Why? They: Silence. Me: Btw I did an extensive check and you´ve published such papers. Here are the links. They: Silence. Me: But a senior male is corresponding author in ALL of them. They: In scope! Pls resubmit asap🧐

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

🔥New preprint w @ElliotMurphy91 & @vittoria_vd ! Are Large Language Models adequate models of language once decomposed into their essential components? How do they deviate from the real-world system they model? What risks and challenges do they run into?

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

@Trashisinthehe1 @madam_shou Αυτά τα κάνουμε εμείς οι χρηματοδοτούμενοι από σκοτεινά κέντρα και συμφέροντα. Ο #πετρακος είναι υπεράνω, διότι σπούδασε στο πανεπιστήμιο Fame Story 2. Σε άλλη χώρα θα είχε παρέμβει κάποια αρμόδια αρχή σίγουρα.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

My baby died inside me at 20 weeks. I was close to death too: acute septic shock due to chorioamnionitis. Scared to live in a world that doesn't allow abortions, therapeutic or not. My uterus, my life, my choice.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

11 months

New #OA paper in @PNASNews with @vittoria_vd & Fritz Gunther! Systematic testing of 3 #LLMs reveals low language accuracy, absence of response stability, and a yes-response bias! Short thread 1/10 👇

Systematic testing of three Language Models reveals low language accuracy, absence of response...

Humans are universally good in providing stable and accurate judgments about what forms part of their language and what not. Large Language Models ...

www.pnas.org

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

@sofoulinii βρωμάει σεξισμό ο μεσιέ Σπανούλης. Λες και τα παιδιά τα έκανε μόνη της η Ολυμπία, λες και ο πατέρας είναι κάτι σαν background prop, αρκεί να φέρνει λεφτά στο σπίτι. Τι να κάνεις, το να είσαι καλός στο να κυνηγάς το τόπι δεν σε κάνει και σωστό άνθρωπο.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

My mom called to say she read the last article I tweeted about. She said 'isn't that great? You were cited many times!' I said 'mama, I wrote it, it's normal to refer to prev work.' Her enthusiasm dropped. 'The others don't cite you?' 'They do.' Well, she'll be watching y'all😂👁️

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 months

Very interesting work by @ev_fedorenko and colleagues! PS. People who don't clutch tightly to previous findings and are happy to revise their beliefs based on new evidence deserve special applause IMO.

Ev (like in 'evidence', not Eve) Fedorenko 🇺🇦

@ev_fedorenko

4 months

@CarinaKauf ’s new work overturns our earlier claim () that local semantic composition drives the language system. New data show that linguistic inputs must be syntactically parsable to fully engage the lang system (and they need not be semant. plausible).

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Contributing to the mentality that treats English monolingualism as the norm means perpetuating a racist ideology. "Small languages" don't need extra justification to be considered valid domains of research. The journal deserves to be named & shamed for letting this comment pass.

Ramon Ruiz-Dolz

@raruidol

2 years

I cannot believe that some reviewers consider that the the relevance of our research was of limited interest because “The domain of argument mining is quite limited” and “Catalan is a relatively small language which may decrease the impact of this work”. Surrealistic.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

Interested in #bilingualism ? We have a generously funded #PhD position at @universitatURV . Deadline: 15/11. More info 👇 @isabel_oltra @rollingURV @englishURV @cofundURV

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

@_jennhu And I want to bring another dimension on the table. The PNAS paper that @spiantado so charitably described as having fallen into pieces, was led by my PhD student @vittoria_vd . A female young student in her earliest steps. Perhaps it's a gender thing, but I'd be reluctant 2/3

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Just gave positive to COVID19. The hardest part is not the pain, not the fever, not the sore throat. It is being isolated and away from my 1yo immunocompromised baby, hoping and praying she didn´t get it. Stay safe y'all.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

6 years

#BigData in #linguistics ? Our article with @RobertaArielli and Kleanthes Grohmann on the challenges the experimental linguist faces eliciting big data from small, young or non-standard languages was just published #openaccess @FrontPsychol . Happy reads!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

@Phmichaelides @lola_cons @CommentaryJho Είναι αναξιοπρεπές να προσκομίζεις βεβαιώσεις όταν εγείρονται υποψίες για συγκεκριμένες παρατυπίες; Να το πω και του πρύτανή μου καλέ, να μην δίνει βεβαιώσεις αβέρτα το πανεπιστήμιο διότι η χρήση τους σημαίνει ότι δεχόμαστε να εξευτελιζόμαστε. Αλάνθαστη λογική.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

I never ask for RTs. But this time seeing a. how unfairly a tenured male professor publicly slams the work of a female PhD student & b. how many people liked his tweet, I'll do it to pass a message. Please RT if as a junior scholar you'd find this unduly harsh too #WomenInScience

Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

@_jennhu And I want to bring another dimension on the table. The PNAS paper that @spiantado so charitably described as having fallen into pieces, was led by my PhD student @vittoria_vd . A female young student in her earliest steps. Perhaps it's a gender thing, but I'd be reluctant 2/3

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

@_roryturnbull Publish without revisions.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

6 months

📌My project Adaptations to Multilingualism offers a funded, flexible/hybrid, 6month research assistant position, 50% dedication, running 01/09/24-28/02/25. If you know Spanish & R, apply here! If you don't like hybrid, Barcelona is a treat.😉 Please RT!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

Our article with @MaritWestergaa1 and Natalia Mitrofanova @AcqVA_Aurora on lexical vs structural similarity & crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition was just published in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

Does ´More people have been to Russia than I have´ sound meaningful? If yes, try again! That´s a comparative illusion; a sentence that looks ok, but is not. Why do we fall for illusions? How even? My last experiment, hot off the press, has some answers!

Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment

Humans are intuitively good at providing judgments about what forms part of their native language and what does not. Although such judgments are robust, consistent, and reliable, human cognition is...

www.mdpi.com

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

If you read one article over Aug holidays, this should be the one: On the Need for Theoretically Guided Approaches to Possible Bilingual Advantages. Excellent work by @BlancoElorrieta & Alfonso Caramazza, that puts this heated topic in its right dimension.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

by reducing its potential into sth that looks dangerously like a beef with a nonagenarian who is unable to defend his ideas. Make no mistake: his ideas ab. LLMs may be wrong. But "we ALWAYS knew"? No, sorry, that's not what scientific debates should look like.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

Straight to rejection, citing divergent assumptions that undermine relevance to the field. I´m sorry to say that it seems to me that these senior, tenured editors simply do not realize how detrimental this delay can be for early career researchers. 4/5

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

@happytinypill Γιατί οπωσδήποτε το πρόβλημα ξεκινά από τους γονείς και όχι από την απουσία κράτους, που πρέπει να κάνεις 50 τεμενάδες για να σε αφήσουν να φύγεις από κάποιες δουλειές χωρίς early notice. Αφήστε, είχα το μωρό μου σε θερμοκοιτίδα 3 μήνες σχεδόν στην Ισπανία, ξέρω καλά το θέμα.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

9 months

He had me eye-rolling at there's someone called @GaryMarcus . I'd also say one needs to be careful: attaching medical labels & pseudodiagnoses to people may get you in trouble. Confabulation is a neuropsychiatric disorder. I'm not saying this. The National Library of Medicine is.

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

9 months

Don't mess with the Godfather. Geoffrey Hinton savages Gary Marcus

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 month

New preprint out! Many people have argued that language distance modulates the degree of recruitment of cognitive control mechanisms, affecting the likelihood of bilingual adaptations.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

@tagara76 @nataliagermanou Δηλαδή πως η τοποθέτηση κάποιου στο τέλος της ζωντανής τοποθέτησης κάποιου άλλου συνιστά παγίδευση; Η μήπως θα βαράμε προσοχή στον κο Ψεκτράκο και δεν επιτρέπεται αντίλογος;

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 months

I understand some people do lots of things for a click, but it would never occur to me to LABEL people I may disagree with this way. Mary: Impossible. John: Sloppy. Kate: Unnatural. So cringe.

AI Coffee Break with Letitia

@AICoffeeBreak

2 months

We recorded the poster presentation of the paper challenging Noam Chomsky's claim about LLMs!🫢 📺 This paper, “Mission: Impossible language models”, won an #ACL2024 best paper award. Congrats @JulieKallini @isabelpapad @rljfutrell @kmahowald @ChrisGPotts

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

@PrigipoPoulos Είναι κάποιος γνωστός από τα παρατράγουδα της Αννίτας; Σχωράτε με, δεν τον ξέρω τον Αρσεν-ΊΟΥ.

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Today at Alba's evaluation. Doc: Preterm, right? Me: Born at 25 weeks. D: Consequences? Me: Anemia of prematurity, treated already, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, getting better, no perm damage. D: That's all? You're SO lucky! Trust me, doctor, I think so every day! 🤩

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

5 months

@AgEInves resolved Consolidación Investigadora! My project TURING (The Language Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Applications) will be hiring 3 postdocs/res assistants. If you know linguistics, #Basque or #Catalan , & #Rstats , TURING is looking for people like you! Pls RT!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

The latest addition was written in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. As was the last work-related email. I'm writing while sitting next to my newborn daughter who is at the NICU due to prematurity. I feel extremely lucky she's well and I hope she comes home soon. 2/4

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

My second story was just published. Don't let the title fool you. This is a story of love. It´s also the type of story that often stays in the margins. Let´s change that. #WomenInScience #SinCienciaNoHayFuturo

Motherhood, tenure-clock, and the Next Big Grant

On August 19, 2021, Valeria’s case made headlines in the Spanish media. Valeria was born sleeping, like my first daughter, Agape. Agape…

medium.com

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

It does. Some scholars should stop being so self-righteous. A reviewer of my last paper wrote "I appreciate crosslinguistic investigation of illusory phenomena. However, it’s unclear what testing illusions in Greek will get us". Ugh whatever Eng got us! *You* are not the default.

Vik Martinović

@martino_vik

4 years

is it just me or does the term <exotic languages> sound wrong and derogatory?

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

the binarity. Am I a Chomskyan linguist? I´ve published results that disagree with Chomsky. And I´ve published results that agree with Chomsky. This binary framing makes me feel that I´m stuck in the middle of the road and thus hit by both generative and non-generative cars. 3/5

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

4 years

The new year starts in a promising way. An author submitted a revised version, responding to Reviewer 3 (me) that they believe that they read Leivada (2017) right. I´ll make a tea and re-read Leivada (2017). I hope I side with myself, but who knows these days! Happy 2021 y´all!

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

1 year

80% of accurate answers=LLMs not hallucinating!! This reminds me of a tweet I read once. When chocolate cookies are made out of 80% chocolate and 20% rat poison, the result is NOT delicious chocolate treats.

Mustafa Suleyman

@mustafasuleyman

1 year

@GaryMarcus @monamhamdy @ESYudkowsky happy to take this bet @GaryMarcus :-) how about we define "largely" as: 80% of the time the model produces a verifiably accurate response to a wide range of questions. and for "by 2025", let's take the middle of the year so June 2025. (if I'm right, I'll donate my proceeds)

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

2 years

Interesting discussion in this thread 👇'Form sentences' in AI does not equal the human ability to form sentences. If you ask me to give you a sentence you've never heard before that contains a new word, I can give you thousands. ChatGPT can't.

Remi van Trijp

@RemivanTrijp

2 years

Does #linguistics twitter realize that the problem of well-formedness has been solved by technology based on next-word prediction? Imho this settles the question of the autonomy of syntax in favor of cognitive-functional and usage-based theories

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Prof. Evelina Leivada

@EvelinaLeivada

3 years

My daughter's 1st earthly possession was not sth I bought. It couldn't have been, at 26 weeks nobody was ready. The nurses wrote her name on the wall in colorful letters, that was her 1st possession. I just put these letters on her door at home! Their gift to my little miracle!🙏

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