What are the most important words? On average, one in every seven utterances in any conversation features small words like ‘m-hmm’, ‘oh’, or ‘huh?’. These humble words streamline our conversations, enable complex language, and help children grasp the fundamentals of the language system. They are, to use a metaphor developed in this project, “words below the waterline”: easily overlooked technologies that help keep language balanced, agile, and easy to steer while in motion. In Elementary Particles of Conversation (2018-2024) we studied these words using comparative and computational approaches en thereby showed how language is shaped by and for social interaction.

Check out our team, or have a look at our papers and public outreach work to learn more.

Selected outcomes

Interjections at the heart of language (doi, pdf) — Occurring every 1 in 7 turns, yet seen as peripheral in linguistics, interjections are the unseen workhorses of our linguistic prowess. Find out how they help learners break into morphosyntax, mediate between sentences and conversational sequences, and scaffold the complexity of language — like the toron of sudano-sahelian earthen architecture

Opening up ChatGPT (doi, pdf) and Rethinking Open Generative AI (doi, pdf) — In which we carry out the first systematic survey of degrees of openness of ‘open’ alternatives for generative AI and formulate a framework with strong implications for policy and research integrity. As featured in Nature News, IEEE Spectrum, Chip.de, TechXplore, De Volkskrant and many more places. Contribute to our crowd-sourced repo!

Beyond Single-Mindedness  (doi, pdf) — A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the cognitive sciences, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. Read more on the companion website.

💡 From Text to Talk (doi, pdf) — in this ACL position paper we show the value of linguistically diverse conversational corpora for understanding, evaluating and designing language technology that is humane and diversity-aware.

For more, check out our publications.