Small Talks is USiL’s recurring event where professors, industry professionals, and researchers engage in direct panel discussions. They are a chance for students to ask questions and gain insights from experts across diverse linguistics fields. Small Talks is a link to real-world perspectives and interdisciplinary discussions in linguistics.
Small Talks
Learning in Toddlers and Large Language Models: a Cross-Domain Linguistic Comparison
March 4th, 2024
Angie Wang
Angie Wang is a James Beard Award-winning editorial illustrator and cartoonist. She has a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics from Reed College and currently teaches illustration at Roski School of Art and Design. She has been obsessed with large language models for the past 14 months, a time period that roughly coincides with her toddler's speech development. She is the author and illustrator of Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot? which is the focal point of March’s Small Talk.
Elsi Kaiser
Dr. Kaiser is a child language acquisition professor in the department of linguistics. Her research revolves around psycholinguistics, with an emphasis on syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Her Language Processing Lab investigates the mechanisms involved in language production and comprehension.
Khalil Iskarous
Dr. Iskarous is a human language as computation professor in the department of linguistics. He is interested in the computational nature of linguistic cognition, especially with regard to modern artificial intelligence. Currently, he is the primary investigator researching causal inference of the perception of cognitive objects in speech.
October 23rd, 2023
Speech Science and Technology
Shrikanth Narayanan
Dr. Narayanan is a Guggenheim fellow with interdisciplinary research focused on human-centered sensing and imaging, signal processing, and machine intelligence centered on human communication, interaction, emotions, and behavior. His talk highlighted advances and possibilities in his multifaceted speech research realm.
Singing as an Object of Linguistic Study
Beatriz Raposo de Medeiros
Dr. Raposo de Medeiros was a visiting scholar in the department of Linguistics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research, supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation, studies the larynx in speech and singing, and proposes how its dynamics can explain its flexibility.