NLP@U period-1 meeting

The period-1 meeting of the Utrecht NLP Hub (NLP@U) will be hosted by the Faculty of Humanities.

Programme:

Presentation

Speaker: Lisa Bylinina

Title: Language technology meets language theory? A case study in word order

Abstract:

What's the relation between language technology -- such as (L)LMs -- and language theory? A lot of discussion focusses on whether theoretical linguistics can be useful for the development of NLP systems. In this talk, I want to explore the opposite direction of this relation: what language technology can do for language theory. Despite the impressive performance of (L)LMs in recent years, their impact on theoretical linguistics has remained minimal. There are various reasons for this -- mainly, cognitive implausibility of (L)LM architectures and training setups, as well as their blackbox nature. Still, we wonder if aspects of linguistic behavior of (L)LMs is driven by something we can think of as 'hidden theory' that would be interesting to explore and compare to existing theories in linguistics.

I will discuss our recent and ongoing work on word order preferences in (L)LMs and their relation to theories of word order. The main empirical content of the talk comes from a recent paper (under review), as well as currently ongoing further experiments in a similar direction.

Pitches and discussion:

We are inviting submissions for the pitches-and-discussion section. Participants may submit a tentative title and a description. Each selected participant will have two (2) minutes to either:

1. Describe an idea you are working on, and ask if anyone is interested in discussing this idea with you, or
2. Propose a topic for debate immediately afterwards.

Each pitch will be followed by thirteen (13) minutes of discussion.

Please fill out this form to submit your pitch.