The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in warning-sign lettering, with a yellow caution triangle and a crossed-out hand symbol. The graphic is not a joke about hostility. It is a boundary statement wearing the clothes of public signage. I want to read that design closely, because the interesting thing about it is not …
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The Composition Notebook as Costume: Reading a Printed Cover
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The rectangle is black-and-white speckled, the binding strip dark along the left edge, and the white ruled label is headed COMPOSITION. Inside the label, an outlined ghost and pumpkin sit where a student’s name would normally go. That is the whole design. The composition …
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What Do We Both Know? Stalnaker’s Common Ground as a Test for Dialogue Models
Stalnaker’s common ground is not a score. It is a state: the set of propositions that participants in a conversation take to be shared, and that they treat as available for presupposition and reference. A dialogue model can produce a fluent next turn without updating that state correctly. The useful question is therefore not whether …
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Why Discourse Coherence Remains the Hardest Problem in NLP: Narrative Structure as a Diagnostic for What Transformers Lack
Why Discourse Coherence Remains the Hardest Problem in NLP: Narrative Structure as a Diagnostic for What Transformers Lack Read the following continuation of a short narrative prompt. Nothing is obviously broken at the sentence level — the grammar is clean, the register holds, the transitions read smoothly if you only look at adjacent sentences: Prompt: …
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How Language Models Handle Ambiguity and Why It Matters
Ambiguity is a property of natural language in which a single surface form can correspond to multiple underlying structures or meanings. In morphosyntactic terms, this includes lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, and scope ambiguity. For transformer language models, ambiguity is not a peripheral edge case; it is a central test of whether a model has acquired …
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