We welcome you to the public talks at NLP Day 2026 at the University of Exeter.
Talk 1
Zoom scheduled: Friday 25 September 2026 at 10:00 to 11:00, UK/London time - Check you local time at https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1790326800 Location: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/93589650456?pwd=HwnKKCkjYa3Dpa8TkPX72WA... (Meeting ID: 935 8965 0456 Password: 514707)
Title: How do LLMs use context?
Abstract: Understanding language requires more than processing words, it involves interpreting words in context and keeping track of a changing context. How do large language models perform these operations internally? In this talk, I explore this question through the lens of mechanistic interpretability: (1) resolving literal and figurative meanings in idioms (2) tracking entities as their state changes. These settings allow us to investigate how context shapes internal representations and how models access relevant information in infererence time.
Short Bio: Soyoung Oh is a PhD student supervised by Prof. Vera Demberg at Saarland University. Her research focuses on understanding internal mechanisms of LLMs in reasoning.
Talk 2 Zoom scheduled: Friday 25 September 2026 at 13:30 to 14:30, UK/London time - Check you local time at https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1790339400 Location: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/93589650456?pwd=HwnKKCkjYa3Dpa8TkPX72WA... (Meeting ID: 935 8965 0456 Password: 514707)
Title: The (Algebraic) Nature of Natural Language
Short Bio: Professor Robert C. Berwick is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Berwick received his A.B. degree from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for nearly forty years. He was one of the founders and co-Director of the MIT Center for Biological and Computational Learning. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as MIT’s highest award for junior faculty, the Edgerton Faculty Achievement award, and one of the Vatican’s notable honors, the Pontifical Council for Culture Award. Professor Berwick’s research has spanned several disciplines, from natural language processing to learning theory and to bioinformatics and evolutionary biology, to the interplay between deep learning and human language. He is the author of nearly a dozen books and numerous articles in the area of human language, learning, language processing, neurobiology and evolution, and cognition, including, Why Only Us (MIT Press, 2016), on the evolution of human language, co-written with Professor Noam Chomsky. His most recent book, The Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge, co-authored with Profs Matilde Marcolli and Noam Chomsky, focuses on a new mathematical approach to the formalization of generative grammar.