[Linganth] LLMs and Linguistic Anthropology Reading Group - September 23 - 18:00-20:00 CET

[Anna Weichselbraun]

Dear members of the listserv,


In order to continue the discussions started with our Panel 296 at the 
recent 4S/EASST Conference in Amsterdam entitled "LLMs and the Language 
Sciences <https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst-4s2024/p/14375>", we'd 
like to invite you to a monthly reading workshop. The aims of this 
seminar are to bring together STS and Linguistic Anthropology in order 
to think through LLMs as sociotechnical artefacts, largely structured by 
language ideologies.


First online meeting:*September 23, 2024 - 18:00-20:00 Central European 
Time (CET)*

Zoom link:


RSVPhere: *languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com 
<mailto:languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com>*by September 20th to receive 
the*Zoom*link and the*paper*.

Our first meeting will discuss Michael Castelle's (Warwick) paper:


Contextualizing high-dimensional communication: the relevance of 
linguistic anthropology for theorizing large language models


        Short abstract:

    This paper provides an overview of the fundamental relevance of the
    field of linguistic anthropology to the understanding and/or
    critique of Large Language Models, clarifying aspects of current
    debates about LLMs within NLP research as well as among those in the
    social science and humanities.


        Long abstract:

At the core of the controversiality of Large Language Models (LLMs), on 
the one hand, their implicit rejection of influential theories in 
mainstream linguistics and cognitive science; and on the other, the 
unconscious adoption of interactional paradigms — such as the overt 
dialogicality of the "instruction-tuned" ChatGPT — championed more 
frequently in the humanities and social sciences as fundamental to 
sense-making. Indeed, many computer scientists in contemporary NLP do 
not find it necessary to concern themselves with the wide variety of 
past or present theories of language and learning. However, a prominent 
and arguably misguided assumption has been made by members of the AI 
research community that applying increasing scale to these models' 
training data, training time, and/or architectural size is likely to 
lead to the achievement of superhuman intelligence; this perspective, 
like many individualist approaches to cognition, necessarily downplays 
the role of indexical embodiment, social interaction, and contextually 
reflexive cultural practices in already-sociotechnical human 
communication. I will argue that a better understanding of the field 
known as linguistic anthropology can help understand both current and 
future successes and failure modes of LLMs, as well as helping social 
scientists and humanists to avoid some common, but misguided, avenues of 
critique for LLMs. From century-old works of American anthropological 
linguistics to the more contemporary insights of Michael Silverstein's 
theories of pragmatics and metapragmatics, this resolutely empirical — 
but semiotically and ethnographically well-grounded — school of thought 
provides surprising insights into both the intriguing strengths and 
fundamental limits of these computational artifacts.


Please feel free to circulate this call for participation. If you intend 
to join the meetings, pleaseRSVP here:languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com 
<mailto:languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com> by September 20th to receive 
the paper and the Zoom link!


Hoping to see you all there!


Siri, Anna and Michael


-- 

Universitätsassistentin (post-doc) | Department of European Ethnology | 
University of Vienna

Twitter <https://twitter.com/annaweichselb>

LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-weichselbraun/>

http://www.annaweichselbraun.com <http://www.annaweichselbraun.com/>
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