•   When: Wednesday, April 16, 2025 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
•   Speakers: Professor Nathan Schneider
•   Location: Nguyen Engineering Building, Room 3507
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People don't just talk with natural language: sometimes, they talk about it. A wealth of knowledge about words, grammar, and meaning is communicated metalinguistically—whether it's through dictionaries, language learning resources, scholarly works in linguistics and literature, or social/political/legal discourse. Are current NLP models fluent in metalanguage, and can they provide accurate metalinguistic explanations? I will present case studies looking at two metalinguistically rich genres: (i) online language discussion forums, and (ii) laws and judicial opinions interpreting them. We ask how well large language models can categorize kinds of metalanguage, how well they can answer metalinguistic questions, and how they should—and should not—be used in practice. (Joint work with Shabnam Behzad, Michael Kranzlein, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Kevin Tobia, Brandon Waldon, Ethan Wilcox, and Amir Zeldes.)

Bio:

Nathan Schneider is a computational linguist. As Associate Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Georgetown University, he leads the NERT lab, looking for synergies between practical language technologies and the scientific study of language, with an emphasis on how words, grammar, and context conspire to convey meaning. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award to study NLP vis-à-vis metalinguistic enterprises like language learning, linguistics, and legal interpretation. Recently, he has weighed in on specific interpretive debates in U.S. law; one of these analyses was cited by U.S. Supreme Court justices in a major firearms case. He is active in the NLP community—especially ACL's SIGANN and SIGLEX—and the Universal Dependencies project; and cofounded the SOLID forum for empirical research on legal interpretation. Prior to Georgetown, he inhabited UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Edinburgh. Apart from annotation scheming and computational modeling, he enjoys classical music and chocolate chip cookies.