Nicolás José Fernández Martínez

Universidad de Jaén, Jaén, Spain

Title: 

The Convergence of Linguistics and AI: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract:

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to a profound impact on the field of linguistics. In turn, linguistics can inform AI and NLP, helping them to achieve a more intelligent understanding and generation of human language. This talk explores current trends, challenges, and opportunities at the intersection of linguistics, AI, and NLP.

We will discuss the significant contributions of linguistics to AI, including the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) that can learn and represent linguistic structures. I will share my experience in developing applications such as LORE (LOcative Reference Extractor) and YouTA (Youtube Text Annotator), a linguistically aware corpus annotation tool assisted by LLMs. These examples illustrate the power of interdisciplinary approaches, combining insights from linguistics, NLP, and AI.

The talk will also address the challenges and limitations of current approaches, including issues of explainability and evaluation. Finally, we will explore the opportunities and future directions for research and development, including the potential for LLMs to improve language understanding and language generation. By examining the convergence of linguistics and AI, we can unlock new possibilities for human-AI collaboration and advance our understanding of human language.

Bio: 

Nicolás José Fernández Martínez holds a PhD in Languages, Texts and Contexts from the University of Granada and is a Lecturer in the Department of English Philology at the University of Jaén. His research interests lie within computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), and corpus linguistics, specifically in information
extraction and computational text semantics. He has published in high impact journals indexed in JCR and Scopus and has participated as a speaker in several international conferences and seminars, among others.

He is a member of the editorial board of the _Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research_ of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). In recent research, he has focused on the development of locative reference extractors for tweets related to emergency situations. Also, he has been recently working on the exploitation of AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), for generating, annotating, and evaluating linguistic resources, data, and software.