Monthly online ILFC Seminar: interactions between formal and computational linguistics https://gdr-lift.loria.fr/monthy-online-ilfc-seminar/
The LIFT 2 research group is happy to announce the forthcoming sessions of the ILFC seminar on the interactions between formal and computational linguistics. The seminar is held on Zoom. To attend the seminar and get updates, please subscribe to our mailing list (we now only rarely communicate through other mailing lists): https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/subscribe/seminaire_ilfc
- 2025/02/12 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Miloš Stanojević* (University College London; 15:30-16:30 UTC+0) Title: *Linguistic Universals in Grammars and Language Models *Abstract: *The shared universal properties of human languages have been at the heart of many linguistic debates for decades. A big part of these debates are two core questions: (1) learnability — can all linguistic universals be learned from data alone without any inbuilt prior knowledge, and (2) explanation — why do we see these universals and not some other? In the first part of the talk, I will show recent results on how LLMs fare in picking up a syntactic universal in the idealized scenario where LLM is trained on large amounts of data that comes from a large number of languages. As usual, the number of parameters and amount of data helps but does not fully solve the learnability problem. Even if LLMs could learn a syntactic universal, their performance alone would not help in explaining why the observed syntactic universal exists at the first place. In the second part of the talk, I will show how CCG syntactic theory can provide not only an explanation of why some universals exist but also a prediction of what word orders we will not find in human languages.*
- 2025/03/19 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Gail Weiss* (EPFL) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA] - 2025/04/16 16:30-17:30 UTC+2: *Sacha Beniamine* (University of Surrey; 15:30-16:30 UTC+1) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA] - 2025/05/14 16:30-17:30 UTC+2 (to be confirmed): *Raffaella Bernardi* (University of Trento) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA]