| Course Description |
Artificial Intelligence has made impressive progress in recent years. Nowhere has this progress been
as impressive as in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), concerned with building algorithms
that can parse and generate text in natural language. A new family of NLP algorithms, called
Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit a remarkable ability to generate fluent text. Paragraphs generated
with LLMs are grammatically well-formed, topically relevant, and stylistically coherent – so
much so that they can often fool human readers. This technological development raises fascinating
questions at the crossroads between philosophy, computer science, and linguistics. Can we say that
LLMs really understand language? Do they have any degree of semantic competence? Or are they
simply manipulating text strings without encoding their meanings? What does it even mean to understand
language in the first place? These are some of the questions we will discuss in this seminar,
by reading philosophical work in conjunction with cutting-edge research from computer science and
computational linguistics.
|
