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Linguistic Universals in Grammars and Language Models| title | Linguistic Universals in Grammars and Language Models |
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| start_date | 2025/02/12 |
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| schedule | 15h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | en ligne |
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| summary | The shared universal properties of human languages have been at the heart of many linguistic debates for decades. A big part of these debates are two core questions: (1) learnability — can all linguistic universals be learned from data alone without any inbuilt prior knowledge, and (2) explanation — why do we see these universals and not some other?
In the first part of the talk, I will show recent results on how LLMs fare in picking up a syntactic universal in the idealized scenario where LLM is trained on large amounts of data that comes from a large number of languages. As usual, the number of parameters and amount of data helps but does not fully solve the learnability problem. Even if LLMs could learn a syntactic universal, their performance alone would not help in explaining why the observed syntactic universal exists at the first place. In the second part of the talk, I will show how CCG syntactic theory can provide not only an explanation of why some universals exist but also a prediction of what word orders we will not find in human languages. |
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| responsibles | Bernard |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/02/05 15:32 UTC |
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