Anjali Kantharuban

An overview of the work “Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures” by Shaily Bhatt, Tal August, and Maria Antoniak. The overview describes that We survey and interview interdisciplinary researchers (§3) to develop a framework of writing norms that vary across research cultures (§4) and operationalise them using computational metrics (§5). We then use this evaluation suite for two large-scale quantitative analyses: (a) surfacing variations in writing across 11 communities (§6); (b) evaluating the cultural competence of LLMs when adapting writing from one community to another (§7).

🖋️ Curious how writing differs across (research) cultures?
🚩 Tired of “cultural” evals that don't consult people?

We engaged with interdisciplinary researchers to identify & measure ✨cultural norms✨in scientific writing, and show that❗LLMs flatten them❗

📜 arxiv.org/abs/2506.00784

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Assuming this is the true criteria they are using, it’s telling that “female” and “woman” are on this list but “male” and “man” are not 🙃

Can I be added too?

With @jerelev.bsky.social 's vote and suggestions, here is it:
go.bsky.app/AU2wEvo

Send replies (and pretty plots) to be added :D

Screenshot of the paper title "What Goes Into a LM Acceptability Judgment? Rethinking the Impact of Frequency and Length"

💬 Have you or a loved one compared LM probabilities to human linguistic acceptability judgments? You may be overcompensating for the effect of frequency and length!
🌟 In our new paper, we rethink how we should be controlling for these factors 🧵:

This map shows locations for endangered languages in Europe ranked by language vitality

Always a new linguistic treasure to unearth: I didn't know this UNESCO map from 2018! Of course there is much to say about how accurate it is, with dialects vs languages, extinct vs endangered, but regardless, it shows a type of linguistic diversity in Europe that is rarely highlighted. #LingSky

I'm keeping track of people at the CMU Language Technologies Institute here: go.bsky.app/NhTwCVb. Follow along!