Bram van Dijk

Once Upon a Time... There Were Narratives and Language Models: A Different Story

The relevance of using Language Models (LMs) in trying to understand language acquisition is a hotly debated issue. The debate currently takes place on two levels that I will try to address in this talk. On a theoretical level this amounts to assessing the similarities and differences between LMs and children, to assess strong claims about what LMs are and are not in principle capable of in the context of language acquisition, understanding, and use. On a more methodological level I will show in what ways we can use LMs – and more generally tools from the Natural Language Processing field – to unravel children’s language use and development. In particular I will discuss some empirical work done with ChiSCor, a corpus consisting of Dutch children’s freely-told stories. I will conclude with a reflection on future work and the role of narratives in language acquisition, and training and evaluating LMs.

Bram is affiliated with Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), The Netherlands.

See project at LUMC and project at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science.