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<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class="">Dear all, </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class="">After a year of remote-only sessions, we are happy to have another in-person DH Forum! We look forward to welcoming Allyson Ettinger of the Department of Linguisitcs. </div>
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<div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class="">Registration is strongly encouraged. Due to University of Chicago policies to ensure the health of the community during the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person attendance at this event is restricted
to members of the University of Chicago community only. However, we will be sharing the talk live via Zoom to allow remote attendees to watch as well as participate in the discussion.<span class=""> </span><a href="https://voices.uchicago.edu/dhforum/10-29-21/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" title="https://voices.uchicago.edu/dhforum/10-29-21/" style="margin: 0px;" class="">Register
here</a>. </div>
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<div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class=""><b class=""><span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 14pt;" class="">“Understanding” and prediction in artificial intelligence models</span><br class="">
<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11pt;" class="">Allyson Ettinger, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics</span></b><br class="">
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<div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class=""><span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11pt;" class="">October 29, 11:30am-1pm</span><br class="">
<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11pt;" class="">Joseph Regenstein Library, 122</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class=""><span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11pt;" class="">In recent years, the field of natural language processing (NLP) in artificial intelligence has made what appears to be incredible progress,
with models even surpassing human performance on certain evaluations. How should we interpret these advances? Have these models achieved so-called language “understanding”? Operating on the premise that “understanding” will necessarily involve the capacity
to extract the meaning of language inputs, in this talk I will discuss a series of projects leveraging targeted tests to examine NLP models’ ability to capture linguistic meaning in a systematic fashion. I will first discuss work probing model representations
for compositional meaning, with a particular focus on disentangling compositional information from encoding of lexical properties. I’ll then explore models’ ability to extract and deploy meaning information during word prediction, applying tests inspired by
psycholinguistics to examine the types of information that models are able to encode and access for anticipating words in context. In all cases, these investigations draw on insights and methods from linguistics and cognitive science in order to maintain human-driven
standards for what constitutes language “understanding”, and to ensure that tests are adequately controlled. The results of these studies suggest that although NLP models show a good deal of sensitivity to word-level information, and to a number of semantic
and syntactic distinctions, they show little sign of capturing higher-level compositional meaning, of handling logical impacts of meaning components like negation, or of retaining access to detailed representations of meaning information conveyed in prior
context. I will discuss implications of the findings both for currently dominant model paradigms in NLP, and for the study of language processing in humans.</span></div>
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<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11pt;" class="">Dr. Allyson Ettinger’s research is focused on language processing in humans and in artificial intelligence systems, motivated by a combination of scientific and engineering goals. For studying humans, her
research uses computational methods to model and test hypotheses about mechanisms underlying the brain’s processing of language in real time. In the engineering domain, her research uses insights and methods from cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience
in order to analyze, evaluate, and improve natural language understanding capacities in artificial intelligence systems. In both of these threads of research, the primary focus is on the processing and representation of linguistic meaning.</span><br class="">
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<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt; color: black;" class=""><i class="">If you need any additional accommodations to participate in the Forum, please contact Carmen Caswell (<a href="mailto:caswellc@uchicago.edu" class="">caswellc@uchicago.edu</a>).</i></span><br class="">
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<div style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" class=""><font face="Arial" class="">Carmen Jaramillo Caswell</font>
<div class=""><font face="Arial" class="">Digital Humanities Research Liaison | she/her</font></div>
<div class=""><font face="Arial" class="">6030 S. Ellis Ave. | Chicago, IL 60637</font></div>
<div class=""><font face="Arial" class=""><a href="mailto:caswellc@uchicago.edu" class="">caswellc@uchicago.edu</a></font></div>
<div class=""><font face="Arial" class="">773-834-8703</font></div>
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