Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 1h

Simulations (typology, historical linguistics), entertainment (video games with custom made languages), pedagogy, and general scientific questions.

1

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 2d

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones.
Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs.
A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language?
Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

3 11 32

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 1d

I’m fascinated by the idea of a game like No Man’s Sky where infinite new civilizations could be generated dynamically with their own languages as the player explores the universe.

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 2d

ConlangCrafter could potentially be used in pedagogy, typological and NLP work, and many entertainment applications. Imagine a video game where aliens can speak countless new procedurally-generated languages.

3 7

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 1d

This is so sick.

Next up, Toki Pona - Rust hybrid.

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 2d

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones.
Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs.
A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language?
Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

1 2

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 2d

“Every language is a world” can now be translated into endless new constructed languages.

Conlangcrafter is an LLM pipeline that generates new languages and their grammars.

A language with only vowels? Languages with common triple center embedding? An impossible language?

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 2d

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones.
Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs.
A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language?
Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

1 3 20

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 2d

“Every language is a world” can now be translated into endless new constructed languages.

Conlangcrafter is an LLM pipeline that generates new languages and their grammars.

A language with only vowels? Languages with common triple center embedding? An impossible language?

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 2d

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones.
Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs.
A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language?
Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

1 3 20

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 3d

Excited to announce that our project "Deep language learning: from fiwGAN to LLMs" was awarded the Peder Sather Grant.

We're starting a multi-year collaboration between @uio.no and @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social 🇳🇴

1 2

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 3d

Excited to announce that our project "Deep language learning: from fiwGAN to LLMs" was awarded the Peder Sather Grant.

We're starting a multi-year collaboration between @uio.no and @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social 🇳🇴

1 2

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 5d

Preorder:

www.amazon.com/Artificial-H...

Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI [Beguš, Nina] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

www.amazon.com

2 6

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 5d

AI is reaching the level of complexity where quantitative evaluations are often not feasible anymore.

The Artificial Humanities book outlines how humanistic methodology can be used to approach and evaluate AI today.

The decade of the humanities is here!

@ninabegus.bsky.social

1 2 4

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 5d

Preorder:

www.amazon.com/Artificial-H...

Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI [Beguš, Nina] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

www.amazon.com

2 6

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 5d

AI is reaching the level of complexity where quantitative evaluations are often not feasible anymore.

The Artificial Humanities book outlines how humanistic methodology can be used to approach and evaluate AI today.

The decade of the humanities is here!

@ninabegus.bsky.social

1 2 4

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 6d

Check out this amazing plenary talk by Stephan Meylan, a research scientist in our lab:

Modeling Language Acquisition as Speech Development

youtu.be/VP-tUVqmH8U&...

youtu.be

2 3

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 6d

Check out this amazing plenary talk by Stephan Meylan, a research scientist in our lab:

Modeling Language Acquisition as Speech Development

youtu.be/VP-tUVqmH8U&...

youtu.be

2 3

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 7d

Exciting talk in the linguistics department at UC Berkeley tomorrow!
@rtommccoy.bsky.social

1 10

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10d

Our work on how to model language in humans, animals, and machines with more realistic deep learning approaches in the Communications of ACM today.
cacm.acm.org/news/can-ai-...

2 4

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10d

Our work on how to model language in humans, animals, and machines with more realistic deep learning approaches in the Communications of ACM today.
cacm.acm.org/news/can-ai-...

2 4

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 12d

#DeepPhonology special session at AMP:

Bruno Ferenc Šegedin

"Evaluating Wasserstein GAN discriminators as models of human well-formedness judgments"

3

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

The plenary talk at the hashtag#DeepPhonology Special Session of the AMP 2025 on modeling language with no text from raw data.

"Modeling language acquisition as speech development"

Stephan Meylan (UC Berkeley)

Traditional approaches to language acquisition have conceived of the

1 1 8

Reposted by Gasper Begus

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

The decade of the humanities is coming!

Nina Beguš @ninabegus.bsky.social · 16d

10 years after the initial idea, Artificial Humanities is here! Thanks so much to all who have preordered it. I hope you enjoy reading it and find this research approach as generative as I do. More to come!

1

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

I'll conclude by sketching the potential for rapid progress when we combine rich computational models of individual language processing with linguists' detailed characterizations of language structure.

1

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

I'll show how this approach clarifies the communicative burden of adult listeners, the criteria for "successful" language productions, and the utility of videos of speakers' faces for phonological category induction.

1 1

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

and understanding. I'll argue that treating the input and output of the child learner as raw signal streams (rather than symbols) yields many benefits in the treatment of speaker variability, prosody, multi-modal communication, and offers continuity on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic timescales.

1 1

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

In this talk, I will outline an alternative approach (and corroborating deep neural network models) that treat the development of linguistic representations – especially phonological representations — as emergent solutions to the inferential challenges of real-time language production

1 1

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15d

emergence of speech as a secondary, auxiliary process with respect to the acquisition of an abstract, highly structured set of linguistic rules (e.g., Chomsky's competence-performance distinction; see also de Saussure's langue and parole).

1 2