Papers for

sociolinguistics software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Large language models use culture and practice to do language

Communication, Vocalisation, and Language

Abstract: The contention is that the current batch of Large Language Models don't *understand* language, but they *do* it. Rather than LLMs forming some kind of ``distributed representation'' of symbols, the claim is that LLMs are capturing ``Cultural Intelligence'' and grounding symbols in what the sociologists call practices.

Mon 12 OctComputation and Language

The gist

The paper argues that large language models (LLMs) don't truly understand language like humans do. Instead of forming mental images or ideas of words, these models learn language by capturing shared cultural behaviors and social practices. This way, LLMs perform language tasks by imitating the way people use symbols within their communities. The authors suggest this is how these models 'do' language without deep comprehension.

Open → 2610.16490v1