[ExI] Emily M. Bender — Language Models and Linguistics (video interview)

[Gordon Swobe]

* Bender, not Pender

"It is really important to distinguish between the word as a sequence of
characters as opposed to word in a sense of a pairing of form and meaning."
- Bender

These language models are trained only on the forms of words, the sequences
of characters, not on the meanings.

-gts

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 3:29 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

> I mentioned Emily Pender in another thread. She is Professor of
> Linguistics and Faculty Director of the Master's Program in Computational
> Linguistics at University of Washington.
>
> In the other thread, I made the mistake of introducing her with her
> Octopus thought experiment which I soon realized from the responses here is
> easily misinterpreted outside of the context of her general thesis and the
> academic paper in which she introduced it.
>
> As I learned from this interview, she and her colleague Koller wrote that
> paper in response to a twitter debate in which she found herself arguing
> with non-linguists who insist that language models understand language.
> Like me, she is critical of such claims. She considers them "hype."
>
> The relevant material starts at the 26 minute mark.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaxNN3YRhBA
>
>
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