On December 2, I will give a lesson with my colleague Cristiano Ciaccio during the Autumn School in AI of the PhD Program in Digital Humanities (Università di Genova). The Aument School is open for doctoral and master students in the humanities.
All the information about the school can be found here: https://digitalhumanities.phd.unige.it/node/1526
Title: A Theoretical and Practical Introduction to Neural Language Models: Evaluating and Exploring their Linguistic Abilities
Abstract: The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is experiencing a period of significant progress, largely due to the shift from traditional approaches to neural network-based algorithms. Among these, Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks and in generating coherent and contextually appropriate text. However, this progress goes hand in hand with reduced transparency, making it increasingly difficult to understand how these models operate and what capabilities they possess. The seminar will offer an overview of language models and recent advances in this field, with a particular focus on studies in recent years that have examined the linguistic abilities implicitly encoded by LLMs and how these insights can improve our understanding of how these systems behave across various tasks and applications. In the second part, the session will shift to a more hands-on approach, providing participants with an introduction to how these models can be used and explored in practice.