Linguistics in the Age of Large Language Models.

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• Janet B. Pierrehumbert, University of Oxford
• Friday 15 November 2024, 12:00-13:00
• SS03 and Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4751389294?pwd=Z2ZOSDk0eG1wZldVWG1GVVhrTzFIZz09.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Suchir Salhan.

Recent chatbots have amazed everyone with their human-like language output. However, their relationship to research in the linguistics is opaque; even their inventors do not fully understand why they are so successful. Further, when probed in depth, some of their outputs are less human-like than first impressions would suggest. This talk will consider three aspects of the relationship between LLMs and linguistics, concentrating on examples from morphology and semantics. To what extent do LLMs incorporate insights from linguistics and the language sciences? Do they advance research in the field? Would they perform better if they incorporated more linguistic insights?

BIOSKETCH :

Janet B. Pierrehumbert is the Professor of Language Modelling in the University of Oxford Engineering Science Department. She holds degrees in Linguistics from Harvard and MIT . Much of her Ph.D thesis work was done in the Department of Linguistics and AI Research at AT&T Bell Labs, where she also served as a Member of Technical staff until 1989. She then took up a faculty position in Linguistics at Northwestern University, establishing an interdisciplinary research effort in experimental and computational linguistics. She is known for her research on prosody and intonation, as well as her work on how people acquire and use lexical systems that combine general abstract knowledge of word forms with detailed phonetic knowledge about individual words. In 2015, Pierrehumbert moved to her present position in the the Oxford e-Research Centre at Oxford, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Faculty of Linguistics, Phonetics, and Philology. Her lab group currently focusses on Natural Language Processing, emphasizing questions about the robustness and interpretability of language models and the dynamics of language in communities. She is a fellow of the LSA , the Cognitive Science Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, She was awarded the Medal for Scientific Achievement from the ISCA (the International Speech Communication Association) in 2020, and was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea in 2024.

This talk is part of the NLIP Seminar Series series.

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