Computational and Experimental Methods

New publication and art exhibit by Gašper Beguš

September 3, 2026
Congrats to Gašper Beguš, whose research on whale communication has recently been featured in The Guardian and whose article 'Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference' (with Andrej Leban and Shane Geroon) has recently been published in Royal Society Open Science. In addition, Gašper's work with collaborators Nina Beguš, Metahaven, and Riccardo Petrini is currently being exhibited on campus in the Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations exhibition. The exhibit is in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Anthropology & Art Building, Rm 116, and runs September 3-October 3, 2026. Check it out!

Bleaman publishes on ASR in Yiddish

August 24, 2026

Isaac Bleaman has published an article titled "Automatic transcription of Holocaust testimonies in Yiddish: Orthographic comparison and cross-domain validation" in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes) @ LREC 2026.

A Grammar of Nomlaki

Anna Björklund
2025

This thesis is a grammar of Nomlaki, a Wintuan language of northern California preserved exclusively through archival documents. Many early documenters did not consider Nomlaki sufficiently differentiated from its sister language Wintu to justify separate investigation. As a consequence, Nomlaki is the only Wintuan language without a grammatical description.


This grammar is a preliminary answer to this gap in the Californianist literature. This work is divided into eight chapters. The introduction includes an orientation of Nomlaki in its genetic context, a finding guide for its...

Preliminary Investigations into the Communicative Efficiency of Logographic Writing Systems and Written Languages

Noah Hermalin
2025

It has been argued that language is shaped, at least in part, by functional cognitive pressures to communicate efficiently. The question of whether or not language is efficient has been explored relative to a wide range of linguistic phenomena, and there is mounting evidence that languages do seem to be communicatively efficient. One area which is underexplored in the efficiency literature, however, is whether there is evidence for efficiency pressures shaping writing systems and written language. In the absence of dedicated studies on efficiency in the written modality, it is difficult to say...

Beguš gives a colloquium talk at Berkeley Psych

January 30, 2025

On Tuesday, February 4 at 1PM at 1102 Berkeley Way West, Gašper Beguš will give a colloquium talk for the Department of Psychology titled "Building realistic models of language with deep learning." Click here for more information. All are welcome to attend!

Beguš and Sprouse (et al.) at Wired Big Interview Science Fair

December 5, 2024
Work by Gašper Beguš and Ronald Sprouse and coauthors has been highlighted at the Science Fair at the WIRED's Big Interview on December 3, 2024. More info about the event: https://events.wired.com/big-interview/home. The preprint is available at https://osf.io/preprints/osf/285cs. Congrats! Vowels in Sperm Whales presentation materials

Beguš in The Harvard Crimson

November 29, 2024
Research by Gašper Beguš has recently been featured in The Harvard Crimson's article titled Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something? https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/10/26/project-ceti-translating-whales-scrutiny/

Beguš gives two talks

October 22, 2024

Gašper Beguš gave two invited talks:

An invited plenary talk at the Bridging East and West: Cutting-Edge Perspectives in Language and Cognitive Science conference organized by the Beijing Language and Culture University on October 20, 2024. His talk was titled "New ways of modeling language". An invited talk titled "Jezikoslovne zmožnosti velikih jezikovnih modelov'' at the Mednarodni dan slovarjev 2024 conference, at the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language on October 14, 2024.

Congrats!

Script Encoding Initiative awarded Mellon and Internet Society Foundation grants

September 28, 2024
Anushah Hossain

The Script Encoding Initiative led by Anushah Hossain and Deborah Anderson was awarded two grants this summer to continue its work on making writing systems available on digital devices. A four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation will support research on over twenty writing systems that are not yet incorporated in the Unicode Standard, a widely-implemented communication standard. A second two-year grant from the Internet Society Foundation will support science communication projects to demystify SEI’s work on language technologies for public audiences. Visit SEI’s websiteto learn more about their work.

Beguš speaks at Harvard

September 18, 2024

Gašper Beguš is giving a talk at the linguistics department at Harvard University on Friday, September 20 (https://linguistics.fas.harvard.edu/blog/week-sept-16). The title of the talk is "Building realistic models of language with deep learning". Congrats!