Rob Voigt
robvoigt.bsky.social
Rob Voigt
@robvoigt.bsky.social
using computational methods to understand the linguistic mechanisms of social problems | NLP, socioling, discourse-pragmatics | asst prof at UC Davis Linguistics

https://robvoigt.faculty.ucdavis.edu/
Reposted by Rob Voigt
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 10:11 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
UC Davis is looking to appoint a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07293
Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Sociology of Gender
University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!
recruit.ucdavis.edu
August 29, 2025 at 10:48 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...
Speech and Language Processing
Speech and Language Processing
web.stanford.edu
August 24, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Four papers accepted at the #EMNLP2025 main conference!
1️⃣ Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?
2️⃣ Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models

In these two papers, we look into...
August 20, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
“A woman using a public voice is in trouble.”

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/u...
Robin Lakoff, Expert on Language and Gender, Is Dead at 82
www.nytimes.com
August 15, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
UMich Ling is hiring for a cluster hire position in AI and Linguistics! Come work in a fabulous department with great grad students, supportive colleagues, and one overly school-spirited nut who will tell you where all the fun stuff is on campus.

apply.interfolio.com/171006
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
August 15, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
I just gave a virtual presentation at ACL 2025 on our work about the production–interpretation asymmetry in reference processing in LLMs. If you’re into computational psycholinguistics or the LLMs x cognitive science space, give it a read!
aclanthology.org/2025.acl-sho...
@robvoigt.bsky.social
Leveraging Human Production-Interpretation Asymmetries to Test LLM Cognitive Plausibility
Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingyi Wu, Rob Voigt. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). 2025.
aclanthology.org
July 29, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form
Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...
docs.google.com
June 21, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123
Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!
recruit.ucdavis.edu
May 30, 2025 at 1:30 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.
April 18, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧵1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy
August 16, 2024 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Cory Booker has taken the Senate floor and plans to filibuster as long as he’s physically able to protest the complete disregard for the rule of law by Trump and Musk.

Watch here: www.c-span.org/event/us-sen...
March 31, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now
This is the text of the email just sent to hundreds of international students telling them that their visas have been revoked due to activism or social media posts.
March 29, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
The Shame of Columbia: violating academic freedom

“Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.”
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...
The shame of Columbia University
In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny
open.substack.com
March 22, 2025 at 3:21 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.

The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.
Columbia Concedes to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped
The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.
www.nytimes.com
March 22, 2025 at 2:32 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Looking for a PhD student to come work with me on the ethical implications of NLP from September!

Please share widely and point any interesting students my way! 😊
We are excited to announce a new, funded PhD studentship opportunity, alongside the School of Informatics @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social!

Supervised by @zeerak.bsky.social and starting Sept 2025, the project will examine the ethical implications of natural language processing.

Apply ▶️ edin.ac/40PAXEq
February 11, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Taser was a weapon company. Then it was a body camera company. Now it’s a body camera data company. @robvoigt.bsky.social and I look at some of the promises and challenges of applying natural language processing to BWC footage in a new article (1/5) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
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journals.sagepub.com
February 10, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Wonderful explainer on indirect costs by Dick Aslin open.substack.com/pub/dickasli...
Are we paying too much for biomedical research?
Trump's attack on NIH
open.substack.com
February 9, 2025 at 3:09 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
What is structural racism, and how do we measure it?

@tyson-brown.bsky.social, @pahoman.bsky.social, and I have a forthcoming Annual Review article on @socarxiv.bsky.social. Check it before studying structural racism is banned (and follow Tyson and Trish, new to Bluesky). osf.io/6zbgh/
Advancing the Scientific Study of Structural Racism: Concepts, Measures, and Methods
This review provides ten actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conc...
osf.io
January 29, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Major news:

Donald Trump has just issued a trans military ban, with much of the details left to Hegseth.

It states that being trans is incompatible with "an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle"

I know many military trans people who have served admirably for decades.

Shameful.
January 28, 2025 at 3:59 AM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Postdoctoral position at @cornelluniversity.bsky.social, "from all areas of research that advance the state of the art in data science and the health sciences, extending the reach of data-driven research into novel medical application domains"

Happy to chat!

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29529
Cornell University, Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society
Full service online faculty recruitment and application management system for academic institutions worldwide. We offer unique solutions tailored for academic communities.
academicjobsonline.org
January 25, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
New paper out today in Frontiers in AI!

The sociolinguistic foundations of language modelling

We argue sociolinguistics provides a foundation for understanding LLMs and addressing many challenges

www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

doi.org/10.3389/frai...

techxplore.com/news/2025-01...
Frontiers | The sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling
www.frontiersin.org
January 13, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
Happy New Year everyone! Jim and I just put up our January 2025 release of Speech and Language Processing! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...
Speech and Language Processing
Speech and Language Processing
web.stanford.edu
January 12, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Rob Voigt
CMU LTI is hosting predoc interns this summer, centered around "Language Technologies for All"! Please apply and circulate! lti.cs.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...
CMU LTI Language Technology for All Internship 2025 - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University
The LTI is currently seeking applicants for the summer 2025 Language Technology for All Internship
lti.cs.cmu.edu
January 7, 2025 at 10:42 PM