Agenda

Alessandro Lenci
University of Pisa  

Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics: New Challenges and Perspectives.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) is changing computational linguistics radically, with important epistemological consequences for the research on language  and computation. Prima facie, the “black box” nature of these models and their huge size seem to widen the gap between natural language processing and its possible applications to various aspects of digital humanities. In this talk, I would instead argue that  LLMs have properties that can be extremely beneficial for applications in the humanities. These models pose new challenges to all of us, but they also offer key opportunities that we, as humanists, must be ready to catch.

Alessandro Lenci, PhD, is Full Professor in Linguistics at the University of Pisa, and the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CoLingLab) at the Dept. of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics. He has extensively published on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cognitive science. His main research areas are distributional semantics and its applications in linguistic and cognitive research, computational lexical semantics, computational models of verb argument structure, tools and resources for NLP.  In 2020, he received the “10 year Test-of-Time-Award” by the Association for Computational Linguistics. His last main effort is a book on Distributional Semantics published by Cambridge University Press in the series Studies in Natural Language Processing.

The event is part of the seminar series organized by the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It will be held in person and online.

Link for online participation HERE.

For further information: link