Dagstuhl-Seminar — Linguistics and Language Models: What Can They Learn from Each Other?

In a little over a year since the release of ChatGPT, language models (LMs) have stirred concerns in government, over the possibility that citizens will come to believe the textual and spoken output of such models. Similarly, they have caused panic in education, forcing a rethink of what students are learning and how to assess it. Of concern to us here, is whether LMs mean the end of computational and/or cognitive models of human language learning and language use. Does the practical success of LMs mean that computational linguistics (and perhaps even linguistics itself) is no longer relevant? Or are we missing problems with LMs that computational linguistics (and linguistics more generally) could help us both recognize and surmount?