Linguistic Theory
Linguistic theory investigates the nature of human language, aiming to understand its structure, acquisition, and use. Current research heavily utilizes large language models (LLMs), such as transformer-based architectures, to probe the extent to which these models capture aspects of human linguistic competence, focusing on areas like syntactic structure, semantic interpretation, and the role of context. These studies reveal both the strengths and limitations of LLMs as models of language, informing debates about nativism and the nature of linguistic knowledge, while also providing tools for analyzing large text corpora and predicting human linguistic behavior. The insights gained are valuable for advancing theoretical linguistics and improving natural language processing applications.
Papers
Less is More: Pre-Training Cross-Lingual Small-Scale Language Models with Cognitively-Plausible Curriculum Learning Strategies
Suchir Salhan, Richard Diehl Martinez, Zébulon Goriely, Paula Buttery
Linguistics Theory Meets LLM: Code-Switched Text Generation via Equivalence Constrained Large Language Models
Garry Kuwanto, Chaitanya Agarwal, Genta Indra Winata, Derry Tanti Wijaya