Finally, we asked the respondents about their overall research agenda. Most of them see their goal as adding to scientific knowledge, rather than building 'intelligent' tech. But those who do have the latter goal are also more likely to consider the current LLMs as intelligent.
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We also asked the respondents to categorize different entities as intelligent or not (see sec. 4.3 for rationale for this binarization). The number of respondents who made that choice for current LLMs (with ChatGPT as an example) is between those who made the same choice for amoebas and ants. /5

Here's how many respondents believe that the current and future LLM-based systems can be considered 'intelligent'. We found that students are overall less skeptical than the senior researchers. /4

Here's how many researchers considered various criteria of 'intelligence' important, but lacking in the current LLMs. Interestingly, embodiment isn't considered that important. /3

Here's who our respondents were by career stage, and which field they identified with as their primary research field: /2

🤯 We use the term 'intelligence' a lot, but wth do we mean?

We got 303 survey responses from researchers. The most agreed-on criteria are generalization, adaptability & reasoning.

ACL Findings preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.20959
with @brtrm.bsky.social @terne.bsky.social @heinrichst.bsky.social /1

In #nlp org news @aclmeeting.bsky.social: there were a few clarifications to ACLPUB, based on frequent issues on ARR.

TLDR:

- don't abuse font sizes for figures and tables
- limitations & ethical considerations sections go after conclusion, no page breaks
- two-column formatting for appendices

📢 NAACL reviews have been released!

🆕 feature alert: ARR now has review issue flagging! Thanks @jkkummerfeld.bsky.social & OR team for help with implementation, and other EiCs for supporting the idea! It'll be live after author response. More details here: aclrollingreview.org/authors#step...
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IT University of Copenhagen is the leading Danish university dedicated to IT, and Copenhagen is one of the happiest and most livable cities in the world. The candidates will be part of NLPnorth group (with 5 full-time #NLP faculty), as well as Pioneer Center (a hub for all Danish NLP). /2

📢 I'm hiring in #NLP! 2x PhD students (apply by Nov 22) & postdoc (Nov 15). These positions are part of a large project on the problem of attribution for LLM outputs to the original data sources, on which LLMs were trained.
Credit: @maosbot.bsky.social's advertising image for EU jobs
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There's at least 4 senses in which 'emergent properties' are used in NLP papers. Based on my polls, the most prevalent one turns out to be the one that makes the most headlines, but for which there is the least empirical evidence: the properties not backed by training data.