UT Linguistics Dept

@UT_Linguistics

Undergraduate and doctoral programs in the scientific, computational, and humanistic study of human language. Undergraduate language program in ASL.

Austin, TX utexas.edu/cola/linguisti… Joined November 2015

141 Following 577 Followers 163 Posts

Latest posts 5

UT Linguistics Dept @UT_Linguistics Oct 1

UT Linguistics’ Kyle Mahowald (@kmahowald) and UT Philosophy’s Daniel Drucker (@druckerdaniel) wrote an article for The Atlantic on why AI models use expressives in their chains of thought! Link: nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%…

www.theatlantic.com Why Do AI Agents Sound So Frustrated? “ARGH ... WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald Sep 30

AI agents say things like ARGH and OH MY GOD in their chains of thought. Good reason to think it's not just imitation but that these words play functional roles for doing reasoning. What comes after "oops" is very different than what comes after "aha"...
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UT Linguistics Dept @UT_Linguistics Sep 25

The Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin is hiring for one position whose work is on semantics and pragmatics at the rank of either tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure! See this link for more info: apply.interfolio.com/194172

UT Linguistics Dept @UT_Linguistics Aug 28

We are excited that Lydia Newkirk will join us for AY 26-27 as an Assistant Professor of Instruction. She will teach undergrad and grad semantics courses, and continue her research on cross-linguistic semantics, especially of modal systems. See more below! liberalarts.utexas.edu/linguistics/ne…

UT Linguistics Dept @UT_Linguistics Aug 25

Important work by @UT_Linguistics PhD Student Kaijie Mo (@Kaijie_Mo) on the limits of AI-based in medical recommendations has been featured on the Ai2 blog! See below for more, and also check out her newly accepted paper on this topic at #EMNLP2026!

Ai2 Verified account @allen_ai Aug 18

A model can sound like it knows a drug—even when it doesn’t.

Researchers at @UTAustin, @Northeastern, & @UTMDAnderson found LLMs often lack drug-specific knowledge and instead lean on morphology.

Because Olmo is open, they could use it to trace why. 🧵

allenai.org/blog/olmo-drug…

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UT Linguistics Dept @UT_Linguistics Jul 8

We are thrilled to celebrate our very own Jessy Li (@jessyjli) and Milos Gligoric from @utexasece for winning a Fall 2025 Amazon Research Award! Link to more info: amazon.science/research-award…. Congrats, Jessy and Milos!