[Planktonne]

LLMs are in her field; they are one of her research topics and they're definitely getting funding.

We absolutely should not be ignoring research that doesn't support popular narratives; dismissing her work because it is critical of LLMs is not reasonable.

[stale2002]

It is not that she is critical of LLMs that is the issue.

Instead, it is that she has strong ideological motivations to make certain arguments.

Those motivations being that her research is now worthless, because of LLMs.

I don't believe the alignment doomsayers either, but that is for different reasons than listening to her.

[qt31415926]

In her field doesn't mean that's what she researches, LLMs are loosely in her field but the methods are completely different. Computational linguistics != deep learning. Deep learning does not directly use concepts from linguistics, semantics, grammars or grammar engineering, which is what Emily was researcing for the past decades.

It's the same thing as saying a number theorist and a set theorist are in the same field cause they both work in the Math field.

[Planktonne]

They are what she researches though. She has published research on them.

LLMs don't directly use concepts from linguistics but they do produce and model language/grammar; it's entirely valid to use techniques from those fields to evaluate them, which is what she does. In the same vein, though a self-driving car doesn't work the same way as a human driver does, we can measure their performance on similar tasks.

[qt31415926]

Hmm I looked into it, and looked at papers/pdfs in google scholar's advanced search with her as an author that mentioned LLMs or GPT in the past 3 years. Every single one was a criticism about how they couldn't actually understand anything (e.g. "they're only trained on form" and "at best they can only understand things in a limited well scoped fashion") and that linguistic fundamentals for NLP was more important.

Good to know my hunch was correct