Linguistics PhD student Changbing Yang, cognitive systems undergraduate Franklin Ma, linguistics professor Jian Zhu, and University of Waterloo computer science professor Freda Shi have won an outstanding paper award at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), a top natural language processing (NLP) conference, this year held at Suzhou, China. The outstanding paper award was awarded to only 7 papers out of 1811 accepted and 8000 submitted.
The paper, entitled LingGym: How Far Are LLMs (Large Language Models) from Thinking Like Field Linguists?, showcases the department’s strengths in linguistic fieldwork and NLP. The authors constructed a benchmark from reference grammars to test if LLMs can perform reasoning on the grammatical structures of novel languages.
This is the second paper award at top NLP venues won by Changbing this year. Her co-authored paper Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet was the runner-up for the best theme paper at the Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
