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

- 2025/10/15 16:30-17:30 UTC+2: *Noga Zaslavsky* (New York University) Title: *Cultural evolution of efficient semantic systems in humans and AI* Abstract: *Human languages efficiently compress meanings into words, but how did our semantic systems evolve to be that way? Are AI systems capable of evolving efficient semantic systems and representing meaning as we do? In this talk, I address these open questions from cognitive, cultural, and computational perspectives. First, I show that individual human learners favor efficiently compressed semantic representations. This inductive learning bias, when amplified via cultural transmission, drives the evolution of near-optimally efficient semantic systems. Second, I consider large language models (LLMs) and show that while they vary widely in their semantic alignment with humans, they nevertheless exhibit a similar tendency toward efficient compression: when simulating cultural evolution with LLMs, they iteratively restructure initially random semantic systems towards greater efficiency. Finally, I show that introducing an explicit pressure for efficient compression, grounded in the information bottleneck principle, enables multi-agent reinforcement learning systems to evolve efficient, human-like semantic systems without any human supervision. Taken together, these results demonstrate how humans and AI can evolve efficient semantic systems through social interaction and cultural transmission, and more broadly, they suggest that efficient compression may be a fundamental principle of intelligence.*

- 2025/11/26 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Ece Takmaz* (Utrecht University) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA] - 2025/12/17 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Ethan Wilcox* (Georgetown University) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA] - 2026/01/21 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Gemma Boleda* (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA] - 2026/03/18 16:30-17:30 UTC+1: *Adele Goldberg* (Princeton University) Title: [TBA] Abstract: [TBA]