Prof. Emmanuele CHERSONI, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Linguistics in the Age of Language Models: Research Directions and a Case Study on Event Construal in English Light Verb Constructions. HUFS Linguistics Colloquium. Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea, 24 April 2025.

Abstract
Language models have quickly become the dominant paradigm in Natural Language Processing, and their capability of simulating human language in natural conversations has stimulated unprecedented debates about the upcoming arrival of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). From the perspective of linguists, their success in linguistic tasks comes with many questions: what can language models tell us about language and meaning? Do they learn language as we do? And what are the best methodologies to test their linguistic competence?

In this talk, I will start by briefly summarizing the main open questions about language models and linguistics. Then, I will present a recent case study on using the embeddings extracted from a language model (BERT) to study time representation in light verb constructions in English.