Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender
A new episode of Lingthusiasm!
Click here to listen to ‘Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender’
When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, USA, and cohost of the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. We talk about Emily's work trying to formulate a list of rules that a computer can use to generate grammatical sentences in a language, the differences between that and training a computer to generate sentences using the statistical likelihood of what comes next based on all the other sentences, and the further differences between both those things and how humans map language onto the real world. We also talk about paying attention to communities not just data, the labour practices behind large language models, and how Emily's persistent questions led to the creation of the Bender Rule (always state the language you're working on, even if it's English).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’
Bonus with Janelle Shane: we do a dramatic reading of the funniest auto-generated Lingthusiasm episodes
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Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Here’s the link again to ‘Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender’
Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!
Lauren & Gretchen