James Michaelov
@jamichaelov.bsky.social
Postdoc at Oxford. Research: language, the brain, NLP.
jmichaelov.com
jmichaelov.com
Looking forward to #SNL2026! I’ll be presenting the work published in our recent JML paper about language model scaling and the N400. Find me (or email/message) if you want to chat about predictive coding and NLP in the study of human language comprehension! Paper link: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...
September 28, 2026 at 3:31 PM
Looking forward to #SNL2026! I’ll be presenting the work published in our recent JML paper about language model scaling and the N400. Find me (or email/message) if you want to chat about predictive coding and NLP in the study of human language comprehension! Paper link: doi.org/10.1016/j.jm...
Reposted by James Michaelov
New paper out in @openmindjournal.bsky.social! "Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks". With @jamichaelov.bsky.social , @camrobjones.bsky.social , Tyler Chang, and Ben Bergen. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks
Abstract. In order to ask questions about the mechanisms underpinning human cognition, researchers must control for properties of stimuli that could confound detected effects. In experiments involving...
direct.mit.edu
August 31, 2026 at 2:08 PM
New paper out in @openmindjournal.bsky.social! "Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks". With @jamichaelov.bsky.social , @camrobjones.bsky.social , Tyler Chang, and Ben Bergen. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
I’ll be in San Diego for #ACL2026 and presenting this work at @conll-conf.bsky.social #CoNLL2026 on July 3rd! Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!
Excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper at #NeurIPS this year! Reach out if you’re interested in chatting about LM training dynamics, architectural differences, shortcuts/heuristics, or anything at the CogSci/NLP/AI interface in general! #Neurips2025
July 1, 2026 at 12:57 PM
I’ll be in San Diego for #ACL2026 and presenting this work at @conll-conf.bsky.social #CoNLL2026 on July 3rd! Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!
Seems like a good time to share our new preprint about model openness! (with @catherinearnett.bsky.social @tylerachang.bsky.social Pamela D. Rivière, Samuel M. Taylor @camrobjones.bsky.social @seantrott.bsky.social @rplevy.bsky.social Ben Bergen, and Micah Altman): arxiv.org/abs/2603.26539
June 11, 2026 at 4:04 PM
Seems like a good time to share our new preprint about model openness! (with @catherinearnett.bsky.social @tylerachang.bsky.social Pamela D. Rivière, Samuel M. Taylor @camrobjones.bsky.social @seantrott.bsky.social @rplevy.bsky.social Ben Bergen, and Micah Altman): arxiv.org/abs/2603.26539
Had a great first day at #HSP2026 yesterday! Looking forward to presenting on the relationship between reading time, n-grams, and language model scaling at the 12.10-2pm poster session today!
March 27, 2026 at 11:33 AM
Had a great first day at #HSP2026 yesterday! Looking forward to presenting on the relationship between reading time, n-grams, and language model scaling at the 12.10-2pm poster session today!
Presenting this at the poster session this morning (11-2pm) at #5109
Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!
Excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper at #NeurIPS this year! Reach out if you’re interested in chatting about LM training dynamics, architectural differences, shortcuts/heuristics, or anything at the CogSci/NLP/AI interface in general! #Neurips2025
December 4, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Presenting this at the poster session this morning (11-2pm) at #5109
Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!
Excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper at #NeurIPS this year! Reach out if you’re interested in chatting about LM training dynamics, architectural differences, shortcuts/heuristics, or anything at the CogSci/NLP/AI interface in general! #Neurips2025
December 1, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Looking forward to #NeurIPS25 this week 🏝️! I'll be presenting at Poster Session 3 (11-2 on Thursday). Feel free to reach out!
Excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper at #NeurIPS this year! Reach out if you’re interested in chatting about LM training dynamics, architectural differences, shortcuts/heuristics, or anything at the CogSci/NLP/AI interface in general! #Neurips2025
November 25, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Excited to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper at #NeurIPS this year! Reach out if you’re interested in chatting about LM training dynamics, architectural differences, shortcuts/heuristics, or anything at the CogSci/NLP/AI interface in general! #Neurips2025
Reposted by James Michaelov
I’m in Vienna all week for @aclmeeting.bsky.social and I’ll be presenting this paper on Wednesday at 11am (Poster Session 4 in HALL X4 X5)! Reach out if you want to chat about multilingual NLP, tokenizers, and open models!
✨New pre-print✨ Crosslingual transfer allows models to leverage their representations for one language to improve performance on another language. We characterize the acquisition of shared representations in order to better understand how and when crosslingual transfer happens.
July 27, 2025 at 3:29 PM
I’m in Vienna all week for @aclmeeting.bsky.social and I’ll be presenting this paper on Wednesday at 11am (Poster Session 4 in HALL X4 X5)! Reach out if you want to chat about multilingual NLP, tokenizers, and open models!
New paper accepted at ACL Findings! TL;DR: While language models generally predict sentences describing possible events to have a higher probability than impossible (animacy-violating) ones, this is not robust for generally unlikely events and is impacted by semantic relatedness. 1/3
June 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
New paper accepted at ACL Findings! TL;DR: While language models generally predict sentences describing possible events to have a higher probability than impossible (animacy-violating) ones, this is not robust for generally unlikely events and is impacted by semantic relatedness. 1/3
Reposted by James Michaelov
My paper with @tylerachang.bsky.social and @jamichaelov.bsky.social will appear at #ACL2025NLP! The updated preprint is available on arxiv. I look forward to chatting about bilingual models in Vienna!
✨New pre-print✨ Crosslingual transfer allows models to leverage their representations for one language to improve performance on another language. We characterize the acquisition of shared representations in order to better understand how and when crosslingual transfer happens.
June 5, 2025 at 2:18 PM
My paper with @tylerachang.bsky.social and @jamichaelov.bsky.social will appear at #ACL2025NLP! The updated preprint is available on arxiv. I look forward to chatting about bilingual models in Vienna!
Reposted by James Michaelov
✨New pre-print✨ Crosslingual transfer allows models to leverage their representations for one language to improve performance on another language. We characterize the acquisition of shared representations in order to better understand how and when crosslingual transfer happens.
March 7, 2025 at 4:34 PM
✨New pre-print✨ Crosslingual transfer allows models to leverage their representations for one language to improve performance on another language. We characterize the acquisition of shared representations in order to better understand how and when crosslingual transfer happens.
Reposted by James Michaelov
With all the new people here on Bluesky, I think it’s a good time to (re-)introduce myself. I’m a postdoc at MIT carrying out research at the intersection of the cognitive science of language and AI. Here are some of the things I’ve worked on in the last year 🧵:
November 10, 2024 at 7:34 PM
With all the new people here on Bluesky, I think it’s a good time to (re-)introduce myself. I’m a postdoc at MIT carrying out research at the intersection of the cognitive science of language and AI. Here are some of the things I’ve worked on in the last year 🧵:
Excited to be at #EMNLP #EMNLP2024 this year! Especially interested in chatting about the intersection of cognitive science/psycholinguistics and AI/NLP, training dynamics, robustness/reliability, meaning, and evaluation
Also, I’m going to be attending EMNLP next week - reach out if you want to meet/chat
November 11, 2024 at 7:03 PM
Excited to be at #EMNLP #EMNLP2024 this year! Especially interested in chatting about the intersection of cognitive science/psycholinguistics and AI/NLP, training dynamics, robustness/reliability, meaning, and evaluation
With all the new people here on Bluesky, I think it’s a good time to (re-)introduce myself. I’m a postdoc at MIT carrying out research at the intersection of the cognitive science of language and AI. Here are some of the things I’ve worked on in the last year 🧵:
November 10, 2024 at 7:34 PM
With all the new people here on Bluesky, I think it’s a good time to (re-)introduce myself. I’m a postdoc at MIT carrying out research at the intersection of the cognitive science of language and AI. Here are some of the things I’ve worked on in the last year 🧵:
In the interest of actually posting about my research on here: We know that the predictions that language models make are similar to those that humans make as we process language, but how similar? aclanthology.org/2022.conll-1... 🧵:
April 2, 2024 at 7:21 PM
In the interest of actually posting about my research on here: We know that the predictions that language models make are similar to those that humans make as we process language, but how similar? aclanthology.org/2022.conll-1... 🧵:
Looking forward to the final day of EMMLP! Let me know if you want to chat about our Findings paper: “Emergent inabilities? Inverse scaling over the course of pretraining” arxiv.org/abs/2305.14681 #EMNLP #EMNLP2023
December 10, 2023 at 1:07 AM
Looking forward to the final day of EMMLP! Let me know if you want to chat about our Findings paper: “Emergent inabilities? Inverse scaling over the course of pretraining” arxiv.org/abs/2305.14681 #EMNLP #EMNLP2023
Presenting this at the 2pm poster session today! #EMNLP #EMNLP2023
Excited to present our paper "Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models" at EMNLP next week! arxiv.org/abs/2311.09194
Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical...
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large...
arxiv.org
December 8, 2023 at 1:08 AM
Presenting this at the 2pm poster session today! #EMNLP #EMNLP2023
Excited to present our paper "Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models" at EMNLP next week! arxiv.org/abs/2311.09194
Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical...
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large...
arxiv.org
December 1, 2023 at 12:53 AM
Excited to present our paper "Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models" at EMNLP next week! arxiv.org/abs/2311.09194