References and readings from my Boğaziçi University talk.
References
Foundations of LLMs & Beginner-Friendly Resources
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., & Gomez, A. N. (2017). Attention is all you need.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30(1), 261–272.
Brunila, M., & LaViolette, J. (2022). What company do words keep? Revisiting the distributional semantics of J.R. Firth & Zellig Harris.arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07750.
Osgood, C. E. (1952). The nature and measurement of meaning.Psychological Bulletin, 49(3), 197.
Osgood, C. E., & Tzeng, O. (1990). Language, meaning, and culture: The selected papers of C.E. Osgood. Praeger Publishers.
Salton, G., & Lesk, M. E. (1968). Computer evaluation of indexing and text processing.Journal of the ACM (JACM), 15(1), 8–36.
Salton, G. (1975). A theory of indexing (Vol. 18). SIAM.
Bengio, Y., Courville, A., & Vincent, P. (2013). Representation learning: A review and new perspectives.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 35(8), 1798–1828.
Bengio, Y., Ducharme, R., Vincent, P., & Jauvin, C. (2003). A neural probabilistic language model.Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3(Feb), 1137–1155.
McCoy, R. T., Frank, R., & Linzen, T. (2020). Does syntax need to grow on trees? Sources of hierarchical inductive bias in sequence-to-sequence networks.Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8, 125–140.
Zhu, X., McCoy, R. T., & Frank, R. (2025). The Structural Sources of Verb Meaning Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping.arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.12482.
Yildirim, I., & Paul, L. A. (2024). From task structures to world models: what do LLMs know?Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(5), 404–415.
Dunn, J., & Eida, M. M. (2025). LLMs Learn Constructions That Humans Do Not Know.arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.16837.
Prystawski, B., & Goodman, N. (2025). Thinking fast, slow, and everywhere in between in humans and language models.
Suzgun, M., Gur, T., Bianchi, F., Ho, D. E., Icard, T., Jurafsky, D., & Zou, J. (2024). Belief in the Machine: Investigating Epistemological Blind Spots of Language Models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.21195.
Miscellaneous Articles
Souly, A., Rando, J., Chapman, E., Davies, X., Hasircioglu, B., Shereen, E., … & Kirk, R. (2025). Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples.arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07192.