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            <namePart type="given">Luis</namePart>
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    <abstract>The term Language Models (LMs) as a time-specific collection of models of interest is constantly reinvented, with its referents updated much like the *Ship of Theseus* replaces its parts but remains the same ship in essence. In this paper, we investigate this *Ship of Language Models* problem, wherein scientific evolution takes the form of continuous, implicit retrofits of key *existing* terms. We seek to initiate a novel perspective of scientific progress, in addition to the more well-studied emergence of *new* terms. To this end, we construct the data infrastructure based on recent NLP publications. Then, we perform a series of text-based analyses toward a detailed, quantitative understanding of the use of Language Models as a term of art. Our work highlights how systems and theories influence each other in scientific discourse, and we call for attention to the transformation of this Ship that we all are contributing to.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T What We Talk About When We Talk About LMs: Implicit Paradigm Shifts and the Ship of Language Models
%A Zhu, Shengqi
%A Rzeszotarski, Jeffrey
%Y Chiruzzo, Luis
%Y Ritter, Alan
%Y Wang, Lu
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 April
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Albuquerque, New Mexico
%@ 979-8-89176-189-6
%F zhu-rzeszotarski-2025-talk
%X The term Language Models (LMs) as a time-specific collection of models of interest is constantly reinvented, with its referents updated much like the *Ship of Theseus* replaces its parts but remains the same ship in essence. In this paper, we investigate this *Ship of Language Models* problem, wherein scientific evolution takes the form of continuous, implicit retrofits of key *existing* terms. We seek to initiate a novel perspective of scientific progress, in addition to the more well-studied emergence of *new* terms. To this end, we construct the data infrastructure based on recent NLP publications. Then, we perform a series of text-based analyses toward a detailed, quantitative understanding of the use of Language Models as a term of art. Our work highlights how systems and theories influence each other in scientific discourse, and we call for attention to the transformation of this Ship that we all are contributing to.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.237
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.237/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.237
%P 4628-4646

Markdown (Informal)

[What We Talk About When We Talk About LMs: Implicit Paradigm Shifts and the Ship of Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.237/) (Zhu & Rzeszotarski, NAACL 2025)

• What We Talk About When We Talk About LMs: Implicit Paradigm Shifts and the Ship of Language Models (Zhu & Rzeszotarski, NAACL 2025)

ACL

• Shengqi Zhu and Jeffrey Rzeszotarski. 2025. What We Talk About When We Talk About LMs: Implicit Paradigm Shifts and the Ship of Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4628–4646, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.