You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!
Norm, the formal theoretical linguist, and Claudette, the computational language scientist, have a lovely time discussing whether modern language models can inform important questions in the language sciences. Just as they are about to part ways until they meet again, 25 of their closest friends show up -- from linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and computer science. We use this discussion to highlight what we see as some common underlying issues: the String Statistics Strawman (the mistaken idea that LMs can't be linguistically competent or interesting because they, like their Markov model predecessors, are statistical models that learn from strings) an...
| Authors | Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 April 2026 |
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