Friday, 11th August - 11am Mark Johnson : Seminar

Title: LLMs and the Changing Face of Computational Linguistics

Abstract:

Computational Linguistics has gone through two major conceptual shifts: from symbolic to machine learning approaches, and the Deep Learning revolution.  The surprising ability of Transformers and other Deep Learning models to directly capture sentence and paragraph-length contexts – coupled with enormous training data and compute – enable them to supplant conventional NLP technologies for many practical applications.  In the near future LLMs will realise the slogans “Natural Language is the New Programming Language” and “Natural Language is the New Knowledge Representation Language”, and the talk discusses implications of this.

Bio:

Mark Johnson is Professor of Language Sciences in the School of Computing at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and Chief AI Scientist, Oracle Digital Assistant.  He is also a former President of the ACL and SIGDAT, and former Editor in Chief of TACL.

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