Kyle Mahowald

Kyle Mahowald will speak at the UC San Diego Linguistics Department on Monday, February 2nd, at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.

Filler-gaps and Causal Drawbridges: Linguistic Structure in Language Models

Language models have become adept at generating fluent and grammatically coherent English, prompting fundamental questions about whether their performance can inform our understanding of human language processing. I will describe a few recent experiments from my group, on how we can use mechanistic interpretability techniques to understand linguistic structure, with a particular focus on filler-gap structures. Drawing from these findings and broader theoretical arguments in a recent position piece, I will argue that these kinds of experiments are linguistically informative.