The Infinite Parrot Cage: Language and AI

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have recently made a transformative impact on our lives by reaching or surpassing human performance in many areas considered to require human intelligence, such as education or law. However, despite their empirical success, these models can also introduce biases and hallucinations caused by their training data and by the nature of their training. The talk will explain the underlying reasons for the biases and hallucinations and will suggest some methods aimed at mitigating them.

Serge Sharoff is Professor of Language Technology and Digital Humanities in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, including automated methods for collecting very large corpora from the Web, their analysis in terms of domains and genres as well as extraction of lexicons and terminology from corpora.  The application domains for this kind of research in the Digital Humanities include text annotation, information retrieval, machine translation and computer-assisted language learning.

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