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Isabel Papadimitriou
@isabelpapad
Assistant professor at @UBCLinguistics, previously fellow at @KempnerInst, PhD @stanfordnlp with the lovely @jurafsky.
isabelpapad.com
Joined November 2020
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  • user avatar
    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Nov 11, 2025
    I’m recruiting PhD and Masters students at the University of British Columbia! Looking to work with students interested in LLM interpretability, and intersections with cog ling. The UBC NLP group is growing and awesome, and Vancouver is great. Come to 🇨🇦! isabelpapad.com/#joininglab
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Nov 14, 2024
    Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/admis…
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Sep 17, 2025
    Are there conceptual directions in VLMs that transcend modality? Check out our COLM spotlight🔦 paper! We analyze how linear concepts interact with multimodality in VLM embeddings using SAEs with @Huangyu58589918, @napoolar, @ShamKakade6 and Stephanie Gil arxiv.org/abs/2504.11695
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  • user avatar
    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Nov 14, 2024
    Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/admis…
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    209K
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Mar 15, 2022
    🧅 BERT does well without word order, but most sentences are easy! You know that the unordered words chopped+chef+onions describe a chef chopping onions and not the other way around. What if we test on cases where word order matters? arxiv.org/abs/2203.06204 @rljfutrell @kmahowald
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Apr 27, 2023
    Check out our new paper with @jurafsky! What inductive learning biases influence language learning, and how? We pretrain transformer models on different structures and fine-tune on English to test the learning effects of different inductive biases arxiv.org/abs/2304.13060
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Oct 12, 2022
    We tend to evaluate multilingual models with downstream tasks. But what if there’s more subtle ways that fluency is affected, like having an English “accent” when learning a second language? Check out our new paper with Kezia Lopez and @jurafsky! arxiv.org/abs/2210.05619
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    May 8, 2024
    Really really excited to be joining @UBCLinguistics! I'm so happy to get to work with the lovely people in the department I'll be going to @KempnerInst in the interim, again lucky to work with lovely, interdisciplinary people I'd love to hang if you're in Boston or Vancouver!
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    UBC Linguistics
    @UBCLinguistics
    May 8, 2024
    We are thrilled that Isabel Papadimitriou (@isabelpapad) will be joining @UBCLinguistics as an Assistant Professor as of Sept 2025!
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Oct 14, 2025
    I shared an office with Thomas for a year and saw it with my own eyes: truly never have I seen so much work and original thought go into one interpretability paper
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    Thomas Fel
    @thomas_fel_
    Oct 14, 2025
    🕳️🐇Into the Rabbit Hull – Part I (Part II tomorrow) An interpretability deep dive into DINOv2, one of vision’s most important foundation models. And today is Part I, buckle up, we're exploring some of its most charming features.
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Nov 5, 2020
    "Learning Music Helps You Read", our #emnlp2020 paper with @jurafsky! We use transfer learning between language, music, code and parentheses. Some exciting results about encoding and transfer of abstract structure, and the role (or not!) of recursion arxiv.org/abs/2004.14601
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Jan 29, 2021
    Abstract morphosyntax? In Multilingual Bert?! Yes! Check out our #EACL2021 paper, where we look at how Multilingual BERT representations are influenced by high-order properties of whole languages (rather than just features of inputs). With @rljfutrell @ethanachi @kmahowald
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Jun 27, 2024
    Isaac does some of the most impactful NLP work that I know! This is not just 'Google LM magic', it's the result of extremely hard-nosed and outside-the-box data work and linguistic work, as well as working with speakers. And the whole combo that makes Isaac Isaac!
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    iseeaswell꩜bʂky
    @iseeaswell
    Jun 27, 2024
    Excited to announce that 110 languages got added to Google Translate today! Time for context on these languages, especially the communities who helped a lot over the past few years, including Cantonese, NKo, and Faroese volunteers. Also, a 110-language youtube playlist. 🧵
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Jul 13, 2022
    I'm at NAACL in person (come chat!) and very excited to be giving a keynote at the @sig_typ workshop! I'll talk about What we can learn about language from exploring multilingual language models. Bold title, will she hedge in the talk? Come see for yourself this Thursday at 3:30!
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Dec 10, 2024
    I will be at NeurIPS starting tomorrow! Would love to chat about interpretability, linguistics, language structure, meaning in LLMs. Reach out! Aaaand if you love Vancouver, apply to do a PhD at UBC and work with me! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/admis…
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    Isabel Papadimitriou
    @isabelpapad
    Jun 16, 2025
    Check out our ACL paper! We use shapley interactions to see which words (and phones) interact non-linearly -- what we lose when we assume linear relationships between features. Chat to Diganta in Vienna!
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    Naomi Saphra
    @nsaphra
    Jun 12, 2025
    ACL paper alert! What structure is lost when using linearizing attribution like Shapley? We show the nonlinear interactions between features reflect structures described by the sciences of syntax, semantics, and phonology.
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