Title: Copilots for Linguists
Subtitle: AI, Constructions, and Frames
Series Title: Elements in Construction Grammar
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL: https://cambridge.org/9781009439220

Author(s): Tiago Timponi Torrent, Thomas Hoffmann, Arthur Lorenzi Almeida, Mark Turner

Paperback 9781009439220: £17.00/ $22.00 / 19.84 EURO
Hardback 9781009475907: £49.99 / $64.99 / 58.34 EURO

Abstract:

AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and especially the Frame Semanticist. An AI LLM chatbot is a text-generation system trained on vast amounts of text. To generate text, it must be able to find patterns in the data and mimic some linguistic capacity, at least in the eyes of a cooperative human user. The authors do not focus on whether AIs “understand” language. Rather, they investigate whether AI LLM chatbots are useful tools for linguists. They reframe the discussion from what AI LLM chatbots can do with language to what they can do for linguists. They find that a chatty LLM can labor usefully as an eliciting interlocutor, and present precise, scripted routines for prompting conversational LLMs.

Written In: English (eng)