Talk at AI Seminars 2024/25

On December 9 I gave a talk during the AI Seminars of the PhD program in Digital Humanities of the University of Genova. The aim of the seminars is to present experiences and practices of using AI in different fields, to increase knowledge and develop awareness about the opportunities and risks of using AI in our research fields.

Title: Evaluating Linguistic Abilities of Neural Language Models

Abstract: The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, driven largely by the shift from traditional approaches to state-of-the-art neural network-based algorithms. Among these, Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks and in generating coherent and contextually relevant texts. This improvement, however, comes at the cost of interpretability, since deep neural models offer little transparency about their inner workings and their abilities. In response, a growing body of research is dedicated to analyzing and interpreting LLMs, aiming to shed light on the inner workings and linguistic abilities encoded by these systems. This talk will be divided into two parts. The first part offers an overview of Language Models (LMs) and the recent advancements achieved by these models in the past few years. In the second part, we will focus on recent studies that examine these models’ implicit linguistic abilities, exploring how these insights can enhance our understanding of model behaviour across various tasks and applications.