DigitaL – Linguistics reimagined Talk Series: From Words to Meanings Across Languages - How Neural Models Represent Languages

This event will be taking place in room CHBO 316 at University of Malta and online via Zoom. The meeting will be recorded.

Abstract:

How can a computer represent the meaning of a word? This talk will introduce the idea of word representations, starting from familiar linguistic concepts such as collocation, semantic similarity, and polysemy.

It will show how modern language technologies use patterns to build representations of words and contexts, and how multilingual models extend this idea by relating meanings across languages.

It will be discussed what such models can reveal about language structure, variation, and cross-linguistic similarity, as well as their limitations.