Kyle Mahowald
kmahowald.bsky.social
Kyle Mahowald
@kmahowald.bsky.social
UT Austin linguist http://mahowak.github.io/. computational linguistics, cognition, psycholinguistics, NLP, crosswords. occasionally hockey?
Pinned
LMs need linguistics! New paper, with @futrell.bsky.social, on LMs and linguistics that conveys our excitement about what the present moment means for linguistics and what linguistics can do for LMs. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.17047. 🧵below.
A confounding thing for the linguistics of LMs: the best way to assess their grammatical ability is string probability. Yet string probability and grammaticality are famously not the same!

Really excited to have this out, where we give a formal account, w/ experiments, of how to make sense of that!
New work to appear @ TACL!

Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar.

Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings.

How can both things be true? 🧵👇
November 10, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Oh cool! Excited this LM + construction paper was SAC-Highlighted! Check it out to see how LM-derived measures of statistical affinity separate out constructions with similar words like "I was so happy I saw you" vs "It was so big it fell over".
November 10, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Delighted Sasha's (first year PhD!) work using mech interp to study complex syntax constructions won an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP!

Also delighted the ACL community continues to recognize unabashedly linguistic topics like filler-gaps... and the huge potential for LMs to inform such topics!
November 7, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Interested in doing a PhD at the intersection of human and machine cognition? ✨ I'm recruiting students for Fall 2026! ✨

Topics of interest include pragmatics, metacognition, reasoning, & interpretability (in humans and AI).

Check out JHU's mentoring program (due 11/15) for help with your SoP 👇
The department of Cognitive Science @jhu.edu is seeking motivated students interested in joining our interdisciplinary PhD program! Applications due 1 Dec

Our PhD students also run an application mentoring program for prospective students. Mentoring requests due November 15.

tinyurl.com/2nrn4jf9
November 4, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Two brief advertisements!

TTIC is recruiting both tenure-track and research assistant professors: ttic.edu/faculty-hiri...
NYU is recruiting faculty fellows: apply.interfolio.com/174686

Happy to chat with anyone considering either of these options
TTIC Faculty Opportunities at TTIC
ttic.edu
October 23, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA
October 21, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Curious as to if people think if (when?) ‘superhuman AI’ arrives, will the building blocks of its performance be human recognizable concepts which have been applied and combined in new and novel ways to achieve ‘superhuman’ performance? Or will it be completely uninterpretable?
October 11, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Come join us at the city of ACL!

Very happy to chat about my experience as a new faculty at UT Ling, come find me at #COLM2025 if you’re interested!!
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
October 7, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
We’re hiring faculty as well! Happy to talk about it at COLM!
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
October 8, 2025 at 1:17 AM
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
October 7, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
I will be giving a short talk on this work at the COLM Interplay workshop on Friday (also to appear at EMNLP)!

Will be in Montreal all week and excited to chat about LM interpretability + its interaction with human cognition and ling theory.
A key hypothesis in the history of linguistics is that different constructions share underlying structure. We take advantage of recent advances in mechanistic interpretability to test this hypothesis in Language Models.

New work with @kmahowald.bsky.social and @cgpotts.bsky.social!

🧵👇!
October 6, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Heading to #COLM2025 to present my first paper w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social !

When: Tuesday, 11 AM – 1 PM
Where: Poster #75

Happy to chat about my work and topics in computational linguistics & cogsci!

Also, I'm on the PhD application journey this cycle!

Paper info 👇:
New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language?
Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
October 6, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁

Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit:

1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850
Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models
Language models (LMs) tend to show human-like preferences on a number of syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which these are attributable to direct exposure to the phenomena or more general propert...
arxiv.org
October 6, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Do you want to use AI models to understand human language?

Are you fascinated by whether linguistic representations are lurking in LLMs?

Are you in need of a richer model of spatial words across languages?

Consider UT Austin for all your Computational Linguistics Ph.D. needs!

mahowak.github.io
September 30, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Ever wonder how habituation works? Here's our attempt to understand:

A stimulus-computable rational model of visual habituation in infants and adults doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

This is the thesis of two wonderful students: @anjiecao.bsky.social @galraz.bsky.social, w/ @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social
September 29, 2025 at 11:38 PM
At UT we just got to hear about this in a zoom talk from @sfeucht.bsky.social. I echo the endorsement:
cool ideas about representations in llms with linguistic relevance!
Who is going to be at #COLM2025?

I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.

And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...
September 27, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Can AI aid scientists amidst their own workflows, when they do not know step-by-step workflows and may not know, in advance, the kinds of scientific utility a visualization would bring?

Check out @sebajoe.bsky.social’s feature on ✨AstroVisBench:
Exciting news! Introducing AstroVisBench: A Code Benchmark for Scientific Computing and Visualization in Astronomy!

A new benchmark developed by researchers at the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins is testing how well LLMs implement scientific workflows in astronomy and visualize results.
September 25, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Simon Goldstein and I have a new paper, “What does ChatGPT want? An interpretationist guide”.

The paper argues for three main claims.

philpapers.org/rec/GOLWDC-2 1/7
Simon Goldstein & Harvey Lederman, What Does ChatGPT Want? An Interpretationist Guide - PhilPapers
This paper investigates LLMs from the perspective of interpretationism, a theory of belief and desire in the philosophy of mind. We argue for three conclusions. First, the right object of study ...
philpapers.org
September 24, 2025 at 12:37 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
📣@futrell.bsky.social 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: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
www.cambridge.org
September 15, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Kyle Mahowald
Provocative piece and more interesting than most that have been written about this topic. I greatly encourage people to weigh in!

My own perspective is that while there is utility to LMs, the scientific insights are greatly overstated.
📣@futrell.bsky.social 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: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
www.cambridge.org
September 15, 2025 at 4:02 PM
📣@futrell.bsky.social 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: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
www.cambridge.org
September 15, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Congrats to Leonie on the new gig! Surely though she will mess our Texas summers.
📢Life update📢

🥳I'm excited to share that I've started as a postdoc at Uppsala University NLP @uppsalanlp.bsky.social, working with Joakim Nivre on topics related to constructions and multilinguality!

🙏Many thanks to the Walter Benjamin Programme of the DFG for making this possible.
September 15, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Can AI introspect? Surprisingly tricky to define what that means! And also interesting to test. New work from @siyuansong.bsky.social, @harveylederman.bsky.social, @jennhu.bsky.social and me on introspection in LLMs. See paper and thread for a definition and some experiments!
How reliable is what an AI says about itself? The answer depends on whether models can introspect. But, if an LLM says its temperature parameter is high (and it is!)….does that mean it’s introspecting? Surprisingly tricky to pin down. Our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.14802 (1/n)
August 26, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Lovely write up by @ksetiya.bsky.social on @rkubala.bsky.social’s
piece on the art of crosswords! Come for Robbie, stay for Sondheim crossword quotes. ksetiya.substack.com/p/compositio...
Composition with Grid
A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I adopted a new pastime: we would complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.
ksetiya.substack.com
August 23, 2025 at 6:45 PM