The University of Konstanz and its Department of Linguistics look forward to
awarding an honorary doctorate to Annie Zaenen on the 14th of
October, 2024.
Several activities will take place to mark this occasion.
The last few years have seen substantial progress in machine learning methods. LLMs have solved the natural language parsing problem nearly completely and made substantial progress in the area of lexical semantics and Natural Language Inferencing (NLI). But they present a conundrum: even their developers do not understand their inner workings or how they relate to older insights about linguistic structure. Figuring this out promises to yield insights not only into LLMs but also into how humans process language by showing the similarities and the differences even if at this time one has the feeling we are like the blindfolded sages exploring an elephant. This workshop proposes to spend a day exploring together and comparing approaches.
9:30-9:45 | George Walkden (Konstanz) and Miriam Butt
(Konstanz) Introductory Remarks and Welcome |
9:45-10:30 | Christin Beck (Konstanz) GHisBERT - A language model for historical German |
10:30-10:45 | Coffee |
10:45-11:30 | Anette Frank (Heidelberg) Large Language Models and Linguistic Insights |
11:30-12:15 | Kyle Mahowald (Austin) Language Models as Linguistic Glass Boxes |
12:15-13:30 | Lunch |
13:30-14:15 | Hinrich Schütze (LMU) El-El-Em-Ology: Are LLMs Good for Linguistics? |
14:15-15:00 | Annie Zaenen (Stanford) Can the CMC tell us anything about how GPT4 interprets natural language? |
15:00-15:15 | Coffee |
15:15-16:45 | Round Table Discussion Joan Bresnan (Stanford), Annette Hautli-Janisz (Passau), Katerina Kalouli (Bundesdruckerei), Ronald Kaplan (Stanford), Ken Kahn (ToonTalk), Tracy King (Adobe). |
17:00 | Bernd Stiegler (Dean of the Faculty of Humanities) Introduction and Welcome I |
17:05 | Theodoros Marinis (Head of the Department of
Linguistics) Introduction and Welcome II |
17:10 | Miriam Butt (Department of Linguistics) Laudatio: Part I |
17:20 | Kyle Wohlmut on the Celtic Harp I |
17:25 | Ronald Kaplan (Co-opted by Department of Linguistics) Laudatio: Part II |
17:35 | Katharina Holzinger (Rektor) Presentation of the Honorary Doctorate |
17:40 | Kyle Wohlmut on the Celtic Harp II |
17:45 | Annie Zaenen (Stanford) Thanks and Final Remarks |
18:00 | Reception |