Talk by Prof. Dirk Hovy
Title: Speaking Fluent Gibberish: Why Language Models Do not Understand Language (and What to Do about It)
Abstract: In a world where AI can generate everything from translations to poetry and code, it's tempting to believe that these models truly understand us. Despite its linguistic prowess, today's generative AI still resembles a clever mimic rather than a genuine linguist. In this talk, we will look at thought experiments like the Chinese Room to look at the limitations of statistical models’ knowledge, their inability to grasp context and nuance, and the risks of overestimating their capabilities. We'll find out what this has to do with getting lost in translation, sounding like our own grandfathers, and encountering an incomprehensible Lion. Diving into philosophy, linguistics, and NLP, we investigate what it truly means to 'understand' a language, emphasizing the theoretical and practical implications for future language technology. I will illustrate the important with some recent work in my group on social context in models (i.e., how socio-economic status and gender and emotion impacts LLMs), and what it means for safety and utility in LLMs.
Bio: Dirk Hovy is a professor in the Computing Sciences Department of Bocconi University, the dean for Digital Transformation and AI, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit. Previously, he was faculty at the University of Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a linguistics master’s from Marburg university in Germany. He is interested in what computers can tell us about language and what language can tell us about society. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning. Dirk has authored over 150 articles on these topics, and two textbooks on NLP in Python. Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science, and ethics in NLP), was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference, and general chair of EMNLP 2025. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant project 2020 for research on demographic bias in NLP. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, leather working, and picking up heavy things to put them back down.
- 19 - 19 August,2025
- 12:00 pm - 01:00 pm
- SIT001