BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Linguistics in the Age of Large Language Models. - Janet B. Pierre
 humbert\,  University of Oxford
DTSTART:20241115T120000Z
DTEND:20241115T130000Z
UID:TALK222622@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Suchir Salhan
DESCRIPTION:Recent chatbots have amazed everyone with their human-like lan
 guage output. However\, their relationship to research in the linguistics 
 is opaque\; even their inventors do not fully understand why they are so s
 uccessful. 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\, concentra
 ting on examples from morphology and semantics. To what extent do LLMs inc
 orporate insights from linguistics and the language sciences? Do they adva
 nce research in the field? Would they perform better if they incorporated 
 more linguistic insights?\n\nBIOSKETCH:\n\nJanet B. Pierrehumbert is the P
 rofessor of Language Modelling in the University of Oxford Engineering Sci
 ence Department. She holds degrees in Linguistics from Harvard and MIT.  M
 uch 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 Tech
 nical staff until 1989.  She then took up a faculty position in Linguistic
 s 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 ac
 quire and use lexical systems that combine general abstract knowledge of w
 ord forms with detailed phonetic knowledge about individual words.    In 2
 015\, Pierrehumbert moved to her present position in the the Oxford e-Rese
 arch Centre at Oxford\, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the
  Faculty of Linguistics\, Phonetics\, and Philology. Her lab group  curren
 tly focusses on Natural Language Processing\, emphasizing  questions about
  the robustness and interpretability of language models and the dynamics o
 f language in communities.   She is a fellow of the LSA\, the Cognitive Sc
 ience Society\, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She was el
 ected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019\, She was awarded the Me
 dal for Scientific Achievement from the ISCA (the International Speech Com
 munication Association) in 2020\, and was elected as a member of the Acade
 mia Europaea in 2024. \n
LOCATION:SS03 and Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4751389294?pwd=Z2
 ZOSDk0eG1wZldVWG1GVVhrTzFIZz09
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR