Najoung Kim

Title page of our paper: "Bears, all bears, and some bears. Language Constraints on Language Models' Inductive Inferences"

“All bears have a property”, “Some bears have a property”, “Bears have a property” are different in terms of how the property is generalized to a specific bear – a great example of how language constrains thought!

This holds for kids, adults, and according to our new work, (V)LMs! 🧵

the slides are kanishka's thread but if you are interested in the non-cut-down version of the first half here it is: bsky.app/profile/najo...

happy to have finally made a pilgrimage to ucsd, a special place for some of us :)

You can get more info on my research interests on my website: najoung.kim

And some of the bigger picture thoughts that might not be evident from individual publications here: bsky.app/profile/najo...

I also want to mention that the lang x computation research community at BU is growing in an exciting direction, especially with new faculty like @amuuueller.bsky.social, @anthonyyacovone.bsky.social, @nsaphra.bsky.social, &
@profsophie.bsky.social! Also, Boston is quite nice :)

I'm recruiting through Linguistics (Deadline: Jan 7), CS & CDS (Deadlines: Dec 15).

Find more info here: najoung.kim/students/

My lab at BU is recruiting PhD students and possibly a postdoc this year!

We study humans & machines, centered around topics like meaning, generalization, evaluation methods and design, and the nature of computation and representation that underlie language and cognition.

🫴🫴

SLD Plenary - Najoung Kim [external share] Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci Najoung Kim (Boston University) Society for Language Development Annual Symposium November 6, 2025 1

Here are the slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

For context the intended audience is Lang Dev researchers who are attending a session on "what can LLMs tell us about human language".

If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!

SLD Plenary - Najoung Kim [external share] Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci Najoung Kim (Boston University) Society for Language Development Annual Symposium November 6, 2025 1

Here are the slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

For context the intended audience is Lang Dev researchers who are attending a session on "what can LLMs tell us about human language".

If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!

for something to be considered creative, it has to be semantically/pragmatically felicitous!!!

i was a bit nervous about it but so happy that it was generally well received, even from folks who are usually skeptics! it meant a lot. will share slides soon and hopefully a position paper too, watch this space 👁

so awesome to have spoken alongside Virginia Valian and Ethan Wilcox, and a pre-talk conversation with them was really helpful! people should do this more

screenshot of a slide titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci"

honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

Required qualifications: BA, hands-on engineering experience, and interest in research. Please help spread the word and share with people who might be a good fit! 🪄

Unfortunately only open to US citizens/permanent residents/independent work auth holders.

The first part of this effort was RExBench: bsky.app/profile/najo...

There will be some freedom of scope for the second part of the project within the theme of research agent evaluation - the RA will contribute to scoping the project along with the team as well.

👾 Full-time research assistant position (1 year) with @sebschu.bsky.social and me! 👾

We're looking for someone to join the research agent evaluation team, starting Fall 2025. Application link to be available soon, but feel free to send us your CV and/or come talk to us at #ACL2025. 🧵

I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip.

TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu.

sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...

ever since VLMs were a thing i've been interested in how the additional visual modality changes language in meaningful ways. after negative findings after negative findings, excited to report this result! proud of our junior authors for digging into this 🐸

green carded finally 💚💚

Excited this is finally out and ❤️ to our team @nedwards99.bsky.social @yukyunglee.bsky.social Audrey Mao and Yulu Qin! of course @sebschu great as always 🙏🙏

Seeing an experiment and thinking "but have they tried X? what if we do Y?" is a key part of research and a start to new discoveries. RExBench tests if coding agents can implement new extensions.

It complements recent evals (eg PaperBench from OpenAI
) on replication! See 👇 for details

NEMI 2024 (Last Year)

🚨 Registration is live! 🚨

The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University!

A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖

🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
📝 Register: forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUH...

i'll be in copenhagen for a few days, lmk if you want to get coffee! will be around most of Thurs and early Sat. alternatively you can also come see me give a talk (at a museum apparently) on Fri:

cphnlp.github.io

📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th!

- Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo)
- Exciting posters by other participants

Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1

LouAnn Gerken Obituary (1959 - 2025) - Tucson, AZ - Arizona Daily Star View LouAnn A. Gerken's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

Very sorry to learn of the passing of LouAnn Gerken, who had such an impact on our understanding of the acquisition of speech sounds and sound patterns obits.mlive.com/us/obituarie...

thanks Matt, means a lot!! 😊

Screenshot of a slide that says "what does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?" with a side comment "mostly AI, but humans too!!" for the word system

hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions

🤫🤫🙈

we are scheming to make everyone's lab name a recursive acronym!