At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Gaurav Kamath will be presenting What do Language Models Capture About Scope Ambiguities?.

When:
Tuesday, February 21, 15:00–16:00 (Montréal time, UTC-4)
Where:
MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, the Zoom link is here.

All are welcome to attend.

  • Speaker:
    Gaurav Kamath
    Title:
    What do Language Models Capture About Scope Ambiguities?
    Abstract:

    In recent years, language models (LMs) have achieved human-like performance on a range of tasks designed to test natural language understanding (NLU). Their high performance on NLU tasks has led to claims of these models ‘understanding’ natural language; as a result of the methods by which they are trained, however, little is known about the actual linguistic structures they induce. In this talk, I present ongoing work aimed at investigating the manner in which LMs capture a specific semantic phenomenon: scope ambiguity. Focusing on scope ambiguities generated by quantifiers, negation, modality, quantificational adverbs and intensional verbs, I will cover the results of an experiment conducted on language models and humans, and discuss future experiments aimed at answering the same question.