Today and tomorrow colleagues and I are organising a two-day workshop on the use of LLMs for linguistics research at @UniKoeln: https://sfb1252.github.io/llm-workshop/. This was originally intended as a small, university-internal event, organised as part of the CRC "Prominence in Language", but we have found that there is a lot of interest from colleagues and students about this topic so we are delighted to have 15 poster presentations, in addition to four brilliant keynote speakers, and a concluding panel discussion. 1/馃У
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But what do we mean by LLMs exactly? To ensure that everyone is on the same page, co-organiser @nilsreiter is giving a pre-workshop lecture "An Introduction to Large Language Models: LLMs 101". Attendees get introduced to important distinctions such as user prompt vs. system prompt, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and commercial vs. locally-run open-source models. 2/馃У
Our first keynote speaker is @tschfflr from the Ruhr University Bochum. Tatjana's talk is entitled "Linguistic analysis with LLMs? The case of discourse and pragmatics" and she's brought along no fewer than three studies from her team's work on metaphor detection in religious language, the semantics and pragmatics of emojis, and the detection of hate and candy speech. Her implications for #linguistics research are both very cautious and optimistic as to the future of linguistics. 3/馃У
Tatjana presenting a slide on annotation, data and corpora.
Tatjana speaking at the lectern with an opening slide featuring the image of a robot writing with a feather
Our second keynote speaker of the day is a Mercator Fellow of the CRC "Prominence in Language" @dingemansemark. Mark's asks "What makes LLMs so irresistible?" and begins with our ancient "amazing ability to make sense of nonsense" citing bone-throwing, hand-reading, and horoscopes, before moving to ELIZA and ChatGPT. Mark stresses the need to distinguish between 'understanding' and 'regurgitating', and 'predicting' and 'responding' and introduces what he sees as useful mental models to describe LLMs such as 'stochastic parrots' and 'mansplaining as a service'. In the second half, Mark walked us through the many problems he sees with a recent publication on the supposed metalinguistic abilities of LLMs. Much food for thought for the discussion over coffee and the poster session! 4/馃У
Mark presenting a slide with a quote:
"Decisions made by the general public about emergent technologies depend much more on what that public attributes to such technologies than on what they actually are or can and cannot do"
Joseph Weizenbaum
Computer Power and Human Reason
1976
Mark presenting at the lectern.
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