Richard Futrell

Cool computational linguistics postdoc position with Huteng Dai! careers.umich.edu/job_detail/274…

1/🧵 We are very excited to release our new paper! From Entropy to Epiplexity: Rethinking Information for Computationally Bounded Intelligence arxiv.org/abs/2601.03220 with amazing team @ShikaiQiu @yidingjiang @Pavel_Izmailov @zicokolter @andrewgwils

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the-e…

🎓🤖🧠 Fully funded 4-year PhD in Computational Linguistics @ucl - @UCLBrainScience - Division of Psychology & Language Sciences New lab launching. Open topic. Strong computational focus. 🗓 Apply by 7 January 🇬🇧 UK home-rate students only (unfortunately) Details ⬇️

We’re hiring PhD students and postdocs on LLM theory and interpretability! Topics: 1️⃣ abilities & limitations of transformers and other architectures; 2️⃣ LLM interpretability; 3️⃣ foundations of LLM reasoning; 4️⃣ foundations of AI safety.

I’m recruiting PhD and Masters students at the University of British Columbia! Looking to work with students interested in LLM interpretability, and intersections with cog ling. The UBC NLP group is growing and awesome, and Vancouver is great. Come to 🇨🇦! #joininglab" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">isabelpapad.com/#joininglab

[SRA 2.0] Glad to share that my new paper (with @rljfutrell) titled "Strategic resource allocation in memory encoding: An efficiency principle shaping language processing" is now on Journal of Memory and Language: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Exciting news for the language science community... @UCIrvine has a new Center for Language, Intelligence, and Computation led by Richard Futrell @rljfutrell! Talks are open to all in person or via Zoom. Our inaugural talk on Oct 14, 11 am Pacific will feature Tom McCoy. For information on the Center: clic.socsci.uci.edu For information on the talk: socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/eve…

Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features. Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ln…

Are there conceptual directions in VLMs that transcend modality? Check out our COLM spotlight🔦 paper! We analyze how linear concepts interact with multimodality in VLM embeddings using SAEs with @Huangyu58589918, @napoolar, @ShamKakade6 and Stephanie Gil arxiv.org/abs/2504.11695

There's been lots of discussion on generative linguistics and generative AI. @EvaPortelance and I chime in here, suggesting that Neural Language Models (NLMs) reinforce key tenets of Chomsky’s approach in at least 3 fundamental ways, and that in turn, generative linguistics can

@DLZeki We don’t control that. Here’s a slightly less up to date version! arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047

@rljfutrell There's a link to the paper alright, but it takes you to the main page of the published paper and you need access to download it. That is, there's no link to the pdf version. Shouldn't target papers that are accepting commentary proposals be open access?

📣@kmahowald and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say, go to the link below!

My department, UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences, is hiring at the Assistant Professor (tenure track) level. This is an incredible place to be--consider joining us! Applications due Nov 15th. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

Modeling sentence production as a staged generative process. Work by @JeremyYeaton, newly minted PhD and crew from the lab. osf.io/preprints/psya…

Do LLMs store information in interpretable subspaces -- similar to variables in a program? In our new paper, we decompose representation space into smaller, interpretable, non-basis-aligned subspaces with unsupervised learning.

Honored to have received a Senior Area Chair award at #ACL2025 for our Prosodic Typology paper. Huge shout out to the whole team: @CuiDing_CL, @tpimentelms, @a_stadt, @tamaregev!

Looking forward to attending #cogsci2025! I’m especially excited to meet students who will be applying to PhD programs in Computational Ling/CogSci in the coming cycle. Please reach out if you want to meet up and chat! Email is best, but DM also works if you must quick🧵:

new paper! robust and general "soft" preferences are a hallmark of human language production. we show that these emerge from *any* policy minimizing an autoregressive memory-based cost function w/ @rljfutrell & @jurafsky