New Possibilities for Linguistic Research in the Era of Large Language Models

Subjects: Linguistics and Applied Linguistics >> Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Subjects: Computer Science >> Natural Language Understanding and Machine Translation submitted time 2024-01-11

Yan Shao

Abstract： The research and engineering paradigm of natural language processing has been shifted with the rapid development of large languages models represented by the GPT series. It makes a significant impact on the related fields such as healthcare, education, judiciary and finance. At the same time, it also brings new possibilities for linguistics, the study of language itself. In this paper, we employ GPT4, Baichuan2 as well as ChatGLM3 and investigate their abilities of analyzing complex linguistic phenomena, taking ambiguity as an example. The experimental results show that GPT4 can effectively perceive and understand complex linguistic phenomena by integrating ambiguity resolution and syntactic analysis. For Baichuan2, if it is guided properly via prompt engineering, its analytical ability can be improved without parameter optimization. In addition, the relationship between linguistic phenomena and large language models can be visually demonstrated by monitoring the internal features and neuron activities of the models when processing ambiguous sentences in different context. In general, our experiments indicate that large language models are beneficial to better understanding the analyzing complex linguistic phenomena, hence providing new alternatives for linguistic research.

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