Najoung Kim
najoung.bsky.social
Najoung Kim
@najoung.bsky.social
Pinned
honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social
for something to be considered creative, it has to be semantically/pragmatically felicitous!!!
N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.
November 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM
honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social
November 9, 2025 at 1:27 PM
👾 Full-time research assistant position (1 year) with @sebschu.bsky.social and me! 👾

We're looking for someone to join the research agent evaluation team, starting Fall 2025. Application link to be available soon, but feel free to send us your CV and/or come talk to us at #ACL2025. 🧵
July 25, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip.

TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu.

sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...
Field trip to Nepal! | Linguistic Semantics Lab (LiSLab)
sites.bu.edu
July 24, 2025 at 10:05 PM
ever since VLMs were a thing i've been interested in how the additional visual modality changes language in meaningful ways. after negative findings after negative findings, excited to report this result! proud of our junior authors for digging into this 🐸
Does vision training change how language is represented and used in meaningful ways?🤔The answer is a nuanced yes! Comparing VLM-LM minimal pairs, we find that while the taxonomic organization of the lexicon is similar, VLMs are better at _deploying_ this knowledge. [1/9]
July 22, 2025 at 4:01 PM
green carded finally 💚💚
July 8, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Seeing an experiment and thinking "but have they tried X? what if we do Y?" is a key part of research and a start to new discoveries. RExBench tests if coding agents can implement new extensions.

It complements recent evals (eg PaperBench from OpenAI
) on replication! See 👇 for details
Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions?

We introduce RExBench, a benchmark that tests if a coding agent can implement a novel experiment based on existing research and code.

Finding: Most agents we tested had a low success rate, but there is promise!
July 2, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
🚨 Registration is live! 🚨

The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University!

A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖

🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
📝 Register: forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUH...
June 30, 2025 at 10:55 PM
i'll be in copenhagen for a few days, lmk if you want to get coffee! will be around most of Thurs and early Sat. alternatively you can also come see me give a talk (at a museum apparently) on Fri:

cphnlp.github.io
Copenhagen NLP Symposium 2025
symposium website
cphnlp.github.io
June 18, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th!

- Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo)
- Exciting posters by other participants

Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1
Copenhagen NLP Symposium 2025
symposium website
cphnlp.github.io
May 26, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
Very sorry to learn of the passing of LouAnn Gerken, who had such an impact on our understanding of the acquisition of speech sounds and sound patterns obits.mlive.com/us/obituarie...
LouAnn Gerken Obituary (1959 - 2025) - Tucson, AZ - Arizona Daily Star
View LouAnn A. Gerken's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.
obits.mlive.com
May 29, 2025 at 3:55 PM
hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions
May 4, 2025 at 1:48 PM
in liminal state, as correctly described by a colleague
March 29, 2025 at 1:55 AM
so very excited that naomi is joining!!! a huge win for cds 💖
Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University
@bucds.bsky.social in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ @najoung.bsky.social @amuuueller.bsky.social. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!
March 27, 2025 at 11:15 AM
"Gaming Linguists" good bigram
February 4, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Repost appreciated! 🙏

ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency review period is between 3/18-26, and these reviewers will be excluded from the ARR cycle. If you're interested, please sign up here! docs.google.com/forms/d/1fH7...
ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track emergency reviewer volunteer form
The Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics track at ACL 2025 is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency reviews will take place between 18th to 26th of March, 2025. Thes...
docs.google.com
December 18, 2024 at 3:37 PM
have many tasks but immobilized by car
December 1, 2024 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
Lots of folks talking about scaling LLM inference over this last year

Internally, I’ve been developing and using a library that makes this extremely easy, and I decided to open-source it
Meet the decoding library: github.com/benlipkin/de...

1/7
GitHub - benlipkin/decoding: Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic
Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic - benlipkin/decoding
github.com
November 25, 2024 at 4:19 PM
this is a first... suffering maximized...
November 22, 2024 at 9:15 PM
why say "bad" when you can say "ungood"
November 21, 2024 at 2:47 PM
at the point of the semester where emergency todo lists inside of a todo list is made
November 19, 2024 at 9:17 PM
so proud of Hayley Ross for getting a best paper award at GenBench this year!! 🎉🪅🎉 I'm sure Kate would be too :) check out our paper and share if you think homemade cats are cats!

arxiv.org/abs/2410.17482
November 16, 2024 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Najoung Kim
First bsky post about tinlab at #EMNLP2024! A few highlights:

* Presentations from Aditya Yedetore and Hayley Ross on neural network generalizations!
* I'm giving a keynote at GenBench & organizing BlackboxNLP
* Ask me about our faculty hiring & PhD/postdoc positions at Boston University!
November 8, 2024 at 4:59 PM
First bsky post about tinlab at #EMNLP2024! A few highlights:

* Presentations from Aditya Yedetore and Hayley Ross on neural network generalizations!
* I'm giving a keynote at GenBench & organizing BlackboxNLP
* Ask me about our faculty hiring & PhD/postdoc positions at Boston University!
November 8, 2024 at 4:59 PM