Linguistics Circle Seminar - Mr Vlad Neac葯u
Event: Linguistics Circle Seminar - Mr Vlad Neac葯u
Date: Friday 20 November
Time: 12:00-13:00
Venue: Campus Hub Block O - Room 409
Linguistics Olympiad problems (LOPs) are a special genre of puzzles that present linguistic features and phenomena in an encrypted form.
These problems are used in the International Linguistics Olympiad and related national olympiads and consist of a scaled-down corpus of sentences/phrases/words representative of certain linguistic phenomena.
From this, the solver must infer/deduce a primitive set of grammatical rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many language-related tasks, raising the question of whether such systems can also solve Linguistics Olympiad problems. And if so, how?
In this talk, Mr Vlad Neacsu (Scientific Researcher, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania), will bring together two perspectives: empirical research on the performance of LLMs on LOPs, and pedagogical insights from training students for the International Linguistics Olympiad.
He will discuss why current AI systems often struggle with these problems despite their apparent fluency, focusing on issues such as memorisation and tokenisation.
By comparing how humans and machines approach the same tasks, the talk argues that Linguistics Olympiad problems offer a unique lens on the distinction between pattern recognition and genuine reasoning.
Mr Vlad Neacsu ,will conclude by reflecting on what these findings imply both for the future of AI and for the educational value of linguistics competitions.
This event will be organised by the Institute of Linguistics & Language Technology.
