Chris Potts
@cgpotts.bsky.social
Stanford Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science, and member of @stanfordnlp.bsky.social and The Stanford AI Lab. He/Him/His. https://web.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/
Pinned
Chris Potts
@cgpotts.bsky.social
· Nov 28
If you would like to weird yourself out about time and cultural evolution, I recommend back-to-back consumption of the opening to The Simpsons 26.1, 99pi 114, and Lieberman et al., "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language". youtu.be/8zY9z7IP-1Q?... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-...
@sebastianraschka.com Hey, a fellow listener to @atp.fm (I infer from today's show, 26:55). I have often wondered whether the audience for that show overlapped with my AI/NLP network.
February 14, 2025 at 3:04 AM
@sebastianraschka.com Hey, a fellow listener to @atp.fm (I infer from today's show, 26:55). I have often wondered whether the audience for that show overlapped with my AI/NLP network.
I misunderstood a reference to "Music from Big Pink" in Tyler Cowen's recent interview with Joe Boyd, and now I have spent an entire weekend listening to the band "The Big Pink" on a loop – absolutely perfect for a lost weekend at one's desk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big...
The Big Pink - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
January 27, 2025 at 2:06 AM
I misunderstood a reference to "Music from Big Pink" in Tyler Cowen's recent interview with Joe Boyd, and now I have spent an entire weekend listening to the band "The Big Pink" on a loop – absolutely perfect for a lost weekend at one's desk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big...
I've posted the practice run of my LSA keynote. My core claim is that LLMs can be useful tools for doing close linguistic analysis. I illustrate with a detailed case study, drawing on corpus evidence, targeted syntactic evaluations, and causal intervention-based analyses: youtu.be/DBorepHuKDM
Finding linguistic structure in large language models
YouTube video by Chris Potts
youtu.be
January 13, 2025 at 2:41 AM
I've posted the practice run of my LSA keynote. My core claim is that LLMs can be useful tools for doing close linguistic analysis. I illustrate with a detailed case study, drawing on corpus evidence, targeted syntactic evaluations, and causal intervention-based analyses: youtu.be/DBorepHuKDM
I am confident OpenAI will become profitable. They are smart, creative, highly incentivized, and well-funded. On the other hand, any app/company that depends on capturing most of the value from OpenAI's models has an uncertain future, like the Twitter apps of old.
December 30, 2024 at 12:41 AM
I am confident OpenAI will become profitable. They are smart, creative, highly incentivized, and well-funded. On the other hand, any app/company that depends on capturing most of the value from OpenAI's models has an uncertain future, like the Twitter apps of old.
Reposted by Chris Potts
Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad.
I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.
I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.
December 18, 2024 at 2:08 AM
Bill Labov died this morning. I'm not coherent enough to talk about how important and influential and brilliant he was. I am very sad.
I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.
I was so lucky to know him, and I am grateful every day that he (and Gillian, and Walt, etc) built an academic field where kindness is expected.
Reposted by Chris Potts
Announcement #1: our call for papers is up! 🎉
colmweb.org/cfp.html
And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social
colmweb.org/cfp.html
And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social
December 17, 2024 at 3:48 PM
Announcement #1: our call for papers is up! 🎉
colmweb.org/cfp.html
And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social
colmweb.org/cfp.html
And excited to announce the COLM 2025 program chairs @yoavartzi.com @eunsol.bsky.social @ranjaykrishna.bsky.social and @adtraghunathan.bsky.social
Reposted by Chris Potts
Ok but this last episode of Bob’s Burgers was so wonderful #bobsburgers
December 10, 2024 at 12:45 AM
Ok but this last episode of Bob’s Burgers was so wonderful #bobsburgers
Reposted by Chris Potts
MoEUT: Mixture-of-Experts Universal Transformers
Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning
Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East
Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning
Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East
December 9, 2024 at 7:57 PM
MoEUT: Mixture-of-Experts Universal Transformers
Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning
Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East
Róbert Csordás, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Christopher Potts, Christopher D Manning
Fr, Dec 13, 16:30 PST - Poster Session 6 East
Reposted by Chris Potts
ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models
Spotlight Poster
Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts
Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]
Spotlight Poster
Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts
Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]
December 9, 2024 at 7:57 PM
ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models
Spotlight Poster
Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts
Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]
Spotlight Poster
Zhengxuan Wu · Aryaman Arora · Zheng Wang · Atticus Geiger · Dan Jurafsky · Christopher D Manning · Christopher Potts
Fri 13 Dec 07:00 PM UTC [West Ballroom A-D]
Reposted by Chris Potts
Papers (partly) from @stanfordnlp at #NeurIPS 2024:
Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making
Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu
Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]
Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making
Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu
Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]
December 9, 2024 at 7:57 PM
Papers (partly) from @stanfordnlp at #NeurIPS 2024:
Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making
Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu
Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]
Oral: Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making
Manling Li · Shiyu Zhao · Qineng Wang · Kangrui Wang · … · Weiyu Liu · Percy Liang · Li Fei-Fei · Jiayuan Mao · Jiajun Wu
Wed 11 Dec 11:50 PM UTC [East Ballroom A, B]
My primary role as a Department Chair at Stanford has become complaining about bureaucratic overreach at Stanford. I have send dozens of messages on this topic just this quarter. And yet I have still not mastered the spelling of "bureaucratic".
December 5, 2024 at 5:46 PM
My primary role as a Department Chair at Stanford has become complaining about bureaucratic overreach at Stanford. I have send dozens of messages on this topic just this quarter. And yet I have still not mastered the spelling of "bureaucratic".
Reposted by Chris Potts
Natural Language Processing—artificial intelligence that uses human language—has been on a roll lately. You’ve probably noticed! So the Stanford NLP Group has been growing, and diversifying into lots of new topics, including agents, language model programs, and socially aware #NLP.
nlp.stanford.edu
nlp.stanford.edu
December 4, 2024 at 5:14 PM
Natural Language Processing—artificial intelligence that uses human language—has been on a roll lately. You’ve probably noticed! So the Stanford NLP Group has been growing, and diversifying into lots of new topics, including agents, language model programs, and socially aware #NLP.
nlp.stanford.edu
nlp.stanford.edu
Reposted by Chris Potts
Listening to this awesome talk from @cgpotts.bsky.social .. so in love with the message here ..
As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving ..
youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...
As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving ..
youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...
youtu.be
December 4, 2024 at 5:11 AM
Listening to this awesome talk from @cgpotts.bsky.social .. so in love with the message here ..
As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving ..
youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...
As I'm building systems the most common questions (and review comments) I get asked is about the LL(M)M I'm using and not the systems and the problems they're solving ..
youtu.be/vRTcE19M-KE?...
Reposted by Chris Potts
Article on compositionality with @cgpotts.bsky.social in the new MIT Open encyclopedia of cognitive science! Check it out here: oecs.mit.edu/pub/e222wyjy.... Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and Michael Frank for the opportunity!
Compositionality
oecs.mit.edu
December 4, 2024 at 2:32 PM
Article on compositionality with @cgpotts.bsky.social in the new MIT Open encyclopedia of cognitive science! Check it out here: oecs.mit.edu/pub/e222wyjy.... Thanks to @asifamajid.bsky.social and Michael Frank for the opportunity!
This video should have 175B likes. It's an insightful commentary on intellectual property, the creator economy, and social media anxiety, and it's also just really catchy.
November 30, 2024 at 10:06 PM
This video should have 175B likes. It's an insightful commentary on intellectual property, the creator economy, and social media anxiety, and it's also just really catchy.
Reposted by Chris Potts
Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024, with many AI luminaries as panelists. Poster submissions are open: lu.ma/q5r8b67t
Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024 · Luma
Meetup for practitioners and researchers working on and interested in compound AI systems, inference-time strategies and scaling laws, networks of networks,…
lu.ma
November 30, 2024 at 6:11 PM
Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024, with many AI luminaries as panelists. Poster submissions are open: lu.ma/q5r8b67t
Reposted by Chris Potts
Hi friends, colleagues, followers.
I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student
@berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵
I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student
@berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵
October 14, 2024 at 9:27 PM
Hi friends, colleagues, followers.
I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student
@berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵
I am on the faculty job market! I am a PhD student
@berkeleyischool.bsky.social + Berkeley AI Research. I work on NLP, and I believe all language, whether AI- or human-generated, is ✨social and cultural data✨. My work includes: 🧵
Lena is a masterful Borgesian fiction imagining the first human brain to be captured on disk. The program enters a state of "terror and extreme panic" on boot-up. If you deny that a machine could be sentient, do you deny the story's premise or the potential reality of such terror? qntm.org/mmacevedo
Lena
You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver".
Russian translation
French transla...
qntm.org
November 28, 2024 at 11:44 PM
Lena is a masterful Borgesian fiction imagining the first human brain to be captured on disk. The program enters a state of "terror and extreme panic" on boot-up. If you deny that a machine could be sentient, do you deny the story's premise or the potential reality of such terror? qntm.org/mmacevedo
If you would like to weird yourself out about time and cultural evolution, I recommend back-to-back consumption of the opening to The Simpsons 26.1, 99pi 114, and Lieberman et al., "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language". youtu.be/8zY9z7IP-1Q?... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-...
November 28, 2024 at 7:56 PM
If you would like to weird yourself out about time and cultural evolution, I recommend back-to-back consumption of the opening to The Simpsons 26.1, 99pi 114, and Lieberman et al., "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language". youtu.be/8zY9z7IP-1Q?... 99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-...
I've been going through the Wordle archives seeking to achieve a mind-meld with WordleBot, and I finally did it (in a puzzle from winter 2024). I appreciate that it even seems to have known this was my goal.
November 28, 2024 at 6:58 PM
I've been going through the Wordle archives seeking to achieve a mind-meld with WordleBot, and I finally did it (in a puzzle from winter 2024). I appreciate that it even seems to have known this was my goal.
For PhD recommendation systems: this year, as in every year in my experience, MIT EECS gets my highest recommendation: (1) one subjective multiple choice question that does not really try to hide its subjectivity behind made-up numbers and (2) letter upload. I wish my own institution's were as good.
November 27, 2024 at 10:19 PM
For PhD recommendation systems: this year, as in every year in my experience, MIT EECS gets my highest recommendation: (1) one subjective multiple choice question that does not really try to hide its subjectivity behind made-up numbers and (2) letter upload. I wish my own institution's were as good.
Reposted by Chris Potts
There's a known bug in how we compute "word" probabilities with subword-based LMs that mark beginnings of words -- as pointed out by Byung-doh Oh and Will Schuler, & @tpimentel.bsky.social and Clara Meister
I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!
I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!
![Code: from minicons import scorer
lm = scorer.IncrementalLMScorer("gpt2-xl", "cuda:0")
stimuli = ["I was a matron in France", "I was a mat in France"]
# old way, no correction
# P.S. gpt2 does not automatically add a bos token at the beginning...
lm.token_score(stimuli, bos_token=True, surprisal=True, base_two=True, bow_correction=False)
'''Rounded Output
[[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
('I', 5.85),
('was', 4.28),
('a', 4.67),
('mat', 16.34),
('ron', 1.74),
('in', 2.12),
('France', 11.43)],
[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
('I', 5.85),
('was', 4.28),
('a', 4.67),
('mat', 16.34),
('in', 10.78),
('France', 10.71)]]
'''
# the new way! notice the surprisal of "mat" in both cases
lm.token_score(stimuli, bos_token=True, surprisal=True, base_two=True, bow_correction=True)
'''Rounded Output
[[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
('I', 6.30),
('was', 3.84),
('a', 4.68),
('mat', 16.34),
('ron', 2.11),
('in', 1.75),
('France', 11.42)],
[('<|endoftext|>', 0.0),
('I', 6.30),
('was', 3.84),
('a', 4.68),
('mat', 21.34),
('in', 5.80),
('France', 10.69)]]
'''](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:njnapclhkbrhe3hsq44q2e4w/bafkreif2efemwaqk4tlryxdbmo7b6si2ewhblzefmoxtmzys7bgjmgq5wm@jpeg)
November 25, 2024 at 4:07 PM
There's a known bug in how we compute "word" probabilities with subword-based LMs that mark beginnings of words -- as pointed out by Byung-doh Oh and Will Schuler, & @tpimentel.bsky.social and Clara Meister
I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!
I'm pleased to announce that minicons now includes a fix which runs batch-wise!
Reposted by Chris Potts
Reposted by Chris Potts
I'm excited to kick off my Bluesky presence with wonderful news: Our paper "Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users' Image Description Preferences" won a Best Paper Award at the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at EMNLP! Read it here: aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-...
Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users’ Image Description Preferences
Rhea Kapur, Elisa Kreiss. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact. 2024.
aclanthology.org
November 24, 2024 at 6:39 PM
I'm excited to kick off my Bluesky presence with wonderful news: Our paper "Reference-Based Metrics Are Biased Against Blind and Low-Vision Users' Image Description Preferences" won a Best Paper Award at the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at EMNLP! Read it here: aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-...