Talk on Why Language Models Do Not Understand Language

Title

Speaking Fluent Gibberish: Why Language Models Do Not Understand Language.

 

Abstract

In a world where AI can generate everything from translations to poetry and code, it’s tempting to believe that these models truly understand us. Despite its linguistic prowess, today’s generative AI still resembles a clever mimic rather than a genuine linguist. In this talk, we will draw on thought experiments like the Chinese Room and the octopus on a telegraph wire to look at the limitations of statistical models, their inability to grasp context and nuance, and the risks of overestimating their capabilities. We’ll find out what this has to do with getting lost in translation, sounding like our own grandfathers, and encountering an incomprehensible Lion. Drawing on philosophy, linguistics, and NLP, we investigate what it truly means to ‘understand’ a language, emphasizing the theoretical and practical implications for future language technology.

 

Bio

Dirk Hovy is a Professor in the Computing Sciences Department of Bocconi University, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit. Previously, he was faculty at the University of Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a linguistics master’s in Germany. He is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning. He has authored over 100 articles on these topics, including 3 best paper awards, and two textbooks on NLP in Python. Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science, and ethics in NLP), and was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant project 2020 for research on demographic bias in NLP. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, leather working, and picking up heavy things to put them back down.

Website: https://faculty.unibocconi.eu/dirkhovy/