Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

@wegotlieb.bsky.social

Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics @ Georgetown; formerly postdoc @ ETH Zurich; PhD @ Harvard Linguistics, affiliated with MIT Brain & Cog Sci. Language, Computers, Cognition.

981 followers223 following25 posts

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox reposted

Georgetown Linguistics
@georgetownlingdept.bsky.social

Virtual information session for Georgetown’s 2-year Master’s in Computational Linguistics! Learn about our courses in NLP, psycholinguistics, low-resource languages, digital humanities, and LLMs, plus phonology, syntax, & semantics. DM for registration link. Friday Nov. 21 | 10–11 AM #linguistics

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox reposted

Jennifer Hu
@jennhu.bsky.social

New work to appear @ TACL! Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar. Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings. How can both things be true? 🧵👇

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

🌟🌟This paper will appear at ACL 2025 (@aclmeeting.bsky.social)! New updated version is on arXiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07659 🌟🌟

arxiv.orgarxiv.org
Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox@wegotlieb.bsky.social

⭐🗣️New preprint out: 🗣️⭐ “Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent” with @cuiding.bsky.social , Giovanni Acampa, @tpimentel.bsky.social , @alexwarstadt.bsky.social ,Tamar Regev: arxiv.org/abs/2505.07659

arxiv.orgUsing Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-AccentThis paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that lan...
Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

We see this project as in line with some other recent papers seeking to cast typological variation in information-theoretic terms, with shout-outs to Michaela Socolof, @postylem.bsky.social @futrell.bsky.social (aclanthology.org/2022.coling-...) and Julius Steuer (aclanthology.org/2023.sigtyp-...)

aclanthology.orgMeasuring Morphological Fusion Using Partial Information DecompositionMichaela Socolof, Jacob Louis Hoover, Richard Futrell, Alessandro Sordoni, Timothy J. O’Donnell. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2022.
Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

✅In line with our prediction, we find that mutual information is higher in tonal languages than in non-tonal languages. BUT, the way one represents context is important. When full sentential context is taken into account (mBERT and mGPT), the distinction collapses.

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

🌐But there are intermediate languages, which have lexically contrastive tone, but only sporadically, making some linguists doubt the tonal/non-tonal dichotomy. So, how can we measure how “tonal” a language is? 🧐🧐

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

🌏 Different languages use pitch in different ways. 🌏 “Tonal” languages, like Cantonese, use it to make lexical distinctions. 📖 While others, like English, use it for other functions, like marking whether or not a sentence is a question. ❓

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Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

This version includes 😱New analyses 😱new arguments 😱 and a whole new “Looking Forward” section! If you’re interested in what a team of (psycho) computational linguists thinks the future will hold, check out our brand new Section 8!

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox reposted

John Mansfield
@johnbasil.bsky.social

Me and @wegotlieb.bsky.social were recently invited to write a wide-ranging reflection on the current state of linguistic theory and methodology. A draft is up here. For anyone interested in thinking big about linguistics, we'd be happy to hear your thoughts! arxiv.org/abs/2502.18313 #linguistics

arxiv.orgLooking forward: Linguistic theory and methodsThis chapter examines current developments in linguistic theory and methods, focusing on the increasing integration of computational, cognitive, and evolutionary perspectives. We highlight four major ...
Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

On the positive side, we suggest that LLMs can serve a role as “dialectic” partners 🗣️❔🗣️ helping judges and clerks strengthen their arguments, as long as judicial sovereignty is maintained 👩‍⚖️👑👩‍⚖️

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

🏛️We identify five “myths” about LLMs which, when dispelled, reveal their limitations as legal tools for textual interpretation. To take one example, during instruction tuning, LLMs are trained on highly structured, non-natural inputs.

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

⚖️ We also show, through demonstration, that it’s very easy to engineer prompts that steer models toward one’s desired interpretation of a word or phrase. 📖Prompting is the new “dictionary shopping” 😬 📖 😬

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

🏛️Last year a U.S. judge queried Chat GPT to help with their interpretation of “ordinary meaning,” in the same way one might use a dictionary to look up the ordinary definition of a word 📖 … But is it the same?

Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
@wegotlieb.bsky.social

We argue no! 🙅‍♂️ While LLMs appear to possess excellent language capabilities, they should not be used as references for “ordinary language use,” at least in the legal setting. ⚖️ The reasons are manifold.

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