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Richard Futrell

University of California Irvine
Participates in 2 items

Richard Futrell, Associate Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Language Science, leads the Language Processing Group, studying language processing in humans and machines using information theory and Bayesian cognitive modeling. He also does research on NLP and AI interpretability.
 

Talk

The Place of Language Models in the Information-Theoretic Science of Language | Monday 3

Sessions in which Richard Futrell participates

Monday 3 June, 2024

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 AM
9:00 AM EDT - 10:30 AM EDT | 1 hour 30 minutes
Large Language Models & Understanding

Language models succeed in part because they share information-processing constraints with humans. These information-processing constraints do not have to do with the specific neural-network architecture nor any hardwired formal structure, but with the shared core task of language models and the brain: predicting upcoming input. I show that universals of language can be explained in terms of generic information-theoretic constraints, and that the same constraints explain language model perfor...