Seminar 1: BrIAS Fellow Prof. Rafael Bello
TBD
Seminar 2: BrIAS Fellow Prof. Willem Zuidema
Title: Under the hood: what LLMs learn about our language, and what they teach us about us
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Speech Models (NSMs) have made big advances in the last few years in their abilities to mimic and process human language and speech. Their internal representations, however, are notoriously difficult to interpret, limiting their usefulness for cognitive and neuroscience. However, a new generation of posthoc interpretability techniques, based on causal interventions, provide an increasingly detailed look under the hood. These techniques allow us, in some cases, to reveal the nature of the learned representations, assess how general the learned rules are and formulate new hypotheses on how humans might process aspects of language and speech. I will discuss examples on syntactic priming and phonotactics, and speculate on the future impact of AI-models on the cognitive science of language.
