From left to right, Dr Haim Dubossarsky, Dr Sophie Holmes-Elliott and Dr Chantal Gratton
On 14th May, Queen Mary linguists Dr Chantal Gratton and Dr Sophie Holmes-Elliott teamed up with computer scientist Dr Haim Dubossarsky to deliver a Pint of Science talk entitled Invisible Grammars - Human vs. AI. The talk was presented as part of the Alan Turing Institute event exploring statistics, linguistics and econometrics. You can read more about the event here.
The talk abstract follows:Language consists of thousands of unconscious rules. These rules constitute our ‘mental grammars’ operating silently in our brains while we generate and experience language. Every now and again, we experience linguistic crossroads which cause our brains to return linguistic ‘error’ messages. Things become even more complicated when we consider how AI understands language. By analysing the mistakes AI makes when processing language we can tap into the ‘computational grammar’ that AI exercises to process language and compare it to the human one. This interactive session will have you interrogating your own invisible grammars as well as that of the AI through a series of live demonstrations.