Kate Davidson
@kathryndavidson.bsky.social
New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too
When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh?
We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...
We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...
When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think <em>any</em> means <em>no</em>
Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but...
doi.org
September 30, 2025 at 8:11 PM
New paper with @romanfeiman.bsky.social's lab, special to me given the inspiration from a parenting observation, when my then-2yo would regularly (and sensibly) confuse "anything" with "nothing"; turns out she was not alone and we can learn something about negative concord and semantic variation too
Linguists, encourage potential postdocs who are AI/computationally focused to apply to these fellowships at the Kempner Institute!
Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships!
Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply.
Learn more and apply by Oct. 1:
bit.ly/3UvpSpe
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @shamkakade.bsky.social
Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply.
Learn more and apply by Oct. 1:
bit.ly/3UvpSpe
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @shamkakade.bsky.social
Kempner Research Fellowship - Kempner Institute
The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.
bit.ly
August 25, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Linguists, encourage potential postdocs who are AI/computationally focused to apply to these fellowships at the Kempner Institute!
Reposted by Kate Davidson
Why can’t LMs solve puzzles about the number systems of languages, when they can solve really complex math problems? Our new paper, led by @antararb.bsky.social looks at why this intersection of language and math is difficult, and what this means for LM reasoning! arxiv.org/abs/2506.13886
June 18, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Why can’t LMs solve puzzles about the number systems of languages, when they can solve really complex math problems? Our new paper, led by @antararb.bsky.social looks at why this intersection of language and math is difficult, and what this means for LM reasoning! arxiv.org/abs/2506.13886
Reposted by Kate Davidson
We are super excited to be hosting SALT 35 next week! Whether or not you can make it to the Harvard campus in Cambridge MA next week, you can preview the full program (with links to OSF repositories with abstracts, etc) here: saltconf.github.io/salt35/confe...
May 15, 2025 at 6:44 PM
We are super excited to be hosting SALT 35 next week! Whether or not you can make it to the Harvard campus in Cambridge MA next week, you can preview the full program (with links to OSF repositories with abstracts, etc) here: saltconf.github.io/salt35/confe...
Reposted by Kate Davidson
Hi semantics friends, this is the SALT 35 organizers at Harvard taking over from our SALT 34 at Rochester colleagues! We begin with the hopefully welcome news that this year's abstract submission deadline is now this Friday (Dec. 20), extended from this Wed Dec. 18: saltconf.github.io/salt35/
SALT35
The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory
saltconf.github.io
December 16, 2024 at 8:35 PM
Hi semantics friends, this is the SALT 35 organizers at Harvard taking over from our SALT 34 at Rochester colleagues! We begin with the hopefully welcome news that this year's abstract submission deadline is now this Friday (Dec. 20), extended from this Wed Dec. 18: saltconf.github.io/salt35/