tl;dr There’s a tendency I’ve observed where people trying to argue that language models “understand” language to draw analogies to the experience of disabled people (especially blind and Deafblind people). These analogies are both false and dehumanizing. A recent blog post by a Google VP provides a particularly elaborated version of…

I am honored to have been nominated to run for VP Elect of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This is a four year term with rotating roles: VP Elect (2022), VP (2023), President (2024) and Past President (2025). …

This blog post is a response to a response to a paper. In particular, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis and Nikolaos Aletras have published this response to my blog post reacting to their paper (to appear in Findings of ACL 2021). In the spirit of continuing the discussion, I want to reply to…

This blog post is written in response to a certain kind of pushback inspired by the recent development of ethical review processes at ACL conferences (as well as other related conferences such as NeurIPS). The particular kind of pushback I’m addressing here imposes a very narrow frame on the processes…

tl;dr When I started thinking about writing this, I thought it was going to be a piece about using Twitter to build an effective platform and use it well. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that learning on Twitter is at least an equally important part…

[This is a consolidation of a Twitter thread. For some context, see this previous post.] The GermEval2020 shared task organizers have updated their call, and it is clear that they are taking community feedback seriously. Perhaps the most significant change since the last version is in the framing. The task…

[Disclaimer: This is not a scholarly piece of writing, but rather a series of thoughts set down in a hurry in the context of an on-going discussion, as a medium post rather than a tweet thread. …

Curiosity Working in a male-dominated field (and here I’m referring to natural language processing (NLP), not linguistics), means not just that the significant majority of people active in the field are men, but also that men’s voices are amplified more than others’. We see this in the existence, even in 2019…

I recently received the following email from a student in the MS program that I run (excerpted with permission of the author): Hi Emily, I wanted to follow up about your comments a few weeks back about student mental health and formally thank you. You have been an incredible ally…