DM Howlcroft 👻 is back home in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Business meeting is starting at #EMNLP2026. First part that I'll cover is an ominous presentation on "The Conference Crisis" and the first part is about paper integrity.GPTZero was used for citation checks, with manual verification. 267 papers were desk rejected.

This move from Google destroys entire ecosystems. Birds, bugs, plants — all the many things that make our planet habitable — obliterated. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I did a classic base rate neglect demo in class today. Half of the class did probabilities (Kahneman & Tversky, Bar-Hillel) and half did natural frequencies (Gigerenzer & Hoffrage). Remarkable replication: complete base rate neglect for probabilities and perfect Bayesians for frequencies.

Since 2004, this community has helped make Firefox and the open internet possible. Our “Come Back to Firefox” campaign reunites a few early internet icons to remind people what made the internet special, and why it’s worth protecting.

I think something understated here is that last Dem to introduce a major program was Obama with the ACA, and it provoked such a backlash that he ended up a lame duck for 6 years. That is faulty reasoning, for a couple reasons, but I think it’s part of why they’re hesitant to propose doing anything

NEW: buried in anthropic's hefty ipo documents released yesterday is an interesting admission: the company's increasing reliance on dirty gas to power its data centers is actually exposing it to financial risk wrote about it for @wired.com www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Who wants to submit something so we have an excuse to go to Kyoto? 👀

for example, I may have to cut the fact that one of the first machine translation patents (1933, USSR) was by a guy called Petr Petrovich Troyanskii and the proposed machine involved dictionaries on moving belts www.jstor.org/stable/40009...

there should be a journal called "offcuts" where anyone can submit all the little fun facts they've collected but unfortunately had to cut

Congrats to @barkavi.bsky.social for submitting her PhD thesis! A year ago I had 6 PhD students who needed to submit their theses. All have now done so, which is great.

Please do not submit LLM-written papers to TACL! I appreciate many people (even high-school students) have success doing this with ARR, Neurips, and other mega-conf. But TACL reviewing is still almost all done by people, and LLM/AI slop is very unlikely to be accepted.

RIP learning to design good presentations and develop your own style as part of developing as an academic.

A raciolinguistic finding that has lived rent-free in my head for years is: People rate the exact same English audio as less intelligible when shown a brown person's face rather than a white face. In work led by Maya Nachesa, we see whether multimodal speech recognition models do the same 👀

Attention is all you need... but I don't have any, so this video was a great way to really engage with this poster and dig deep!

The achievement of Serbian students overthrowing Aleksandar Vučić can't be overstated. In 2024, they began protesting. In 2025, they transformed a protest movement into civil dissidence. In 2026, they became a political party — and two months later, crushed a corrupt state-entrenched authoritarian.

Attending #EMNLP2026 or following along from home? Tired of Whova and Underline? Use infrastructure made by researchers instead! Lea recommends talks/posters for you; organizes your own presentations; shows you who is attending; includes a live feed of posts; and more! lea.ac/conferences/...

In 2021, archaeologists announced the discovery of the 3000 year old Egyptian city called "The Dazzling Aten" near Luxor. I want to call your attention to a brick wall under the red arrow. It's 'serpentine' & a single brick wide, separating a housing complex from the road. Why the odd shape?

For this episode of Ben Actually Reads The Documentation, we've discovered the documentation for dplyr's by/.by argument. dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/dp... There's so many functions it works with — mutate, summarise, filter, slice Avoids writing group_by() and ungroup() so often #rstats

Find us at #EMNLP2026 to learn about narrative qualities of pretraining data! 🌟 📊 Via our Explorer tool, you can interact with 13M pretraining passages and 11 narrative dimensions, plus upload your own data for analysis: cls-lab.colorado.edu/tejo9855/dol... We'd love to see what you discover! 👀

I'll be at EMNLP. Let's talk. 🙂

Heard about the existence of this paper from @irisvanrooij.bsky.social, it's by @saklein.bsky.social (She even sent me the paper through e-mail because my uni didn't have access to it through the website, thank you!!) Live thread (as I read through it) muse.jhu.edu/article/1001...

'If human experience becomes the scarce part of education, who gets it? This is where the analogy stops being an interesting exercise in market strategy and becomes a widening participation question.'

I love this idea, if anyone leaving #INLG2026 or otherwise in #NLP would like to go through papers from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago looking for what's relevant to our work today 👀

As people are taking stock of the conference, we appreciate the kind words and hope to see everyone again in the future!

Congrats to my students Iniakpokeikiye Thompson and Jawwad Baig for winning the "Best Evaluation" award at INLG. This is for their paper "One Feedback System Does Not Fit All:Localising Data-to-Text Driver Coaching for the UK and Nigeria" ehudreiter.com/2026/09/17/l...

We were overjoyed to host a record number of NLG fans in Utrecht in 2026 and to spend these exciting 5 days together! Looking forward to what 2027 has in store. #INLG2026

There is nothing about Musk as a person that isn't completely hack and forgettable. There's literally nothing new or novel about him, and all he's ever done is take credit for what his staff actually works on. He's a parasite. Even now, the managing up stories I've heard...

This guy. The fall is going to be epic, loud, and dangerous and seemingly momentus, and then a week later we'll just never mention him again.

Some TN counties used BMDs (touchscreen where it marks a paper ballot you then turn in) or DRE/VVPAT (counts straight from the touchscreen but also prints a paper trail). These are inferior to hand-marked optical scan ballots. Touchscreens can be poorly calibrated and have higher error rates.

Many years ago, I was working in rural Tanzania, there was a sick old woman who needed to go to clinic in town. But she had never been in a motor vehicle before, was terrified of them. She refused to get in the truck. In the end her daughter got her drunk, we drove her to clinic, and all was well

For real, I've faced police across a lot of countries, including prior France. This was just bad weird, just a lot of wtf.

“Universities exist precisely because specialized knowledge matters. The further decisions move from those with the expertise, the more educational quality suffers, and the more students bear the consequences.”