TL;DR It’s annoying to be plagiarised, but what I’ve come to worry about more is how pay-to-publish predatory journals forgo peer review in order to prey on fellow academics and rob them of learning opportunities. Even if you know better than to publish in them, they are a symptom of the collective action problem that plagues much of academic publishing.
I serve on the advisory board of Language Science Press, a high quality open access publisher in linguistics. I alo co-edit a book series with the press. A recent query to the board concerned AI in submissions. I share my answer here because it may be useful beyond the LangSciPress community. Lightly edited to make more sense as a standalone post. I support the Press taking a clear stance in this matter. I think synthetic text (AI slop, i.e.
I recently came across a blog included in Rogue Scholar that was producing a barrage of posts along the lines of “Animals that start with [letter]”. They included the inspiring “Animals that start with P”, the highly original “Animals that start with H” and of course the intriguing “Animals that start with M”. Here is the introduction to that one: Any opening like this sets off my LLM alarm bells.
I had a very weird exchange with Oxford University Press the other day that made me realise how deeply they are implicated in the surveillance capitalism we’ve grown accustomed to from Elsevier and the like. The good news: there are plenty of alternatives.
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and must write about it. Warning: snark detected. This is a new paper by Green, Kong, Brysbaert, and Keogh with the following abstract: “This paper revisits the Age of Acquisition (AoA) norms of Kuperman et al. (2012). Three studies were conducted.
Academic home pages are a special genre. Publication lists are a key part of it: our published scholarly work pretty much defines us (at least as far as our academic persona is concerned). I think every academic should have a full publication list somewhere —why do some universities make this so hard?— but home pages often just have a list of selected papers. How do people make this selection?
Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. Here I discuss a paper about knots and intuitive reasoning in Open Mind. The paper ties itself into knots about intuitive physics, but pulling at some of the threads, it turns out it’s actually more like a Trojan horse for 4E cognition.
Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.
I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. Over the past week I have worked with Rogue Scholar to archive selected content from The Ideophone and make it more durably accessible. This posts documents the process and some of the choices made.
Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps the one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.
Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. How can we break this trend?