Despite Their Feats, Large Language Models Still Haven’t Contributed to Linguistics

Before you come at me with pitchforks and torches for such a controversial title, please hear me out. Over the past few years, we’ve seen headlines and examples of what Large Language Models (BERT, GPT-3, LaMDA, etc.) can do — an explosion of capabilities in tasks ranging from sentiment classification, text generation, question answering, and more. This article is not questioning the engineering strides that Large Language Models (LLMs) have made over the past half decade. Rather, it’s a look into critiques around what LLMs have contributed to the science of linguistics. I’ll mainly be discussing Professor Noam Chomsky’s takes and views on linguistics and, more recently, LLMs; and I’ll be referencing the sources below: <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/despite-their-feats-large-language-models-still-havent-contributed-to-linguistics-657bea43a8a3">Click Here</a>