The French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC), Taipei Office organise the following conference:

Abstract:

Since the introduction of the ChatGPT conversational chatbot in November 2022, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been at the forefront of the current AI revolution. Their strong performance on NLP benchmarks, together with their striking naturalness in conversation, contributed to stimulate a new debate in public discourse and media about the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It has been shown that LLMs can display new abilities and generalizations that were not predictable simply on the basis of parameter scaling-up (i.e. emergent abilities), which also prompted the question on whether such systems can generate novel concepts and ideas beyond what they have seen during their training – or, in other words, whether they can be creative. Although machines may not be creative in the same way as humans are, the fact that AI-generated texts and images are becoming more and more undistinguishable from human creations raised a lot of debate and the understandable fear that, consequently to the application of the new technology in fields such as journalism, literature and visual arts, many jobs are going to disappear. In my talk, I will try to address the following question: What are the applications of LLMs to the Humanities, and what is next for our disciplines? I will focus on a specific case study from the field of Chinese Digital Humanities: the usage of LLMs for automatizing the translation of theBlack Myth Wukong videogame.

Speaker: Emmanuele Chersoni, Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechic University.

Dr. Emmanuele Chersoni is an Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He holds a joint PhD in Language Sciences from Aix-Marseille University (France) and the University of Pisa (Italy). His research lies at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, with a particular focus on how semantic aspects of sentences impact human language understanding. Dr. Chersoni has contributed significantly to computational linguistics, publishing in top-tier venues like ACL, EMNLP, and Computational Linguistics. His work has been recognized with several best paper awards. He is also had been an organizer of the Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics workshop. His research extends to natural language processing applications in digital humanitied and specialized domains, including biomedical and financial texts.

This seminar will be held in English.
Corrado Neri, Director of the CEFC Taipei, will chair the session.