Event: Public Lecture on Language and metalanguage by Dr Slavomír Čéplö
Date: Wednesday 24 January 2024
Time: 17:00
Venue: Meeting Room 102, Valletta Campus, St Paul’s Street, Valletta
On Wednesday 24 January at 17:00, Dr Slavomír Čéplö will give a public lecture on “Language and metalanguage: How I started to worry about linguistics and not because of ChatGPT” hosted by the Department of Maltese in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta.
The lecture is being held at Valletta Campus, St Paul’s Street, Valletta, in Meeting Room 102.
A spectre is haunting modern linguistics – the spectre of LLMs, or large language models. LLMs create new content in response to user commands based on their training data and are trained on huge amounts of text sources. However, in his talk, Dr Čéplö will not mention ChatGPT et al. Instead he will be talking about older and endemic issues that plague modern linguistics, such as groupthink, myopia, metalanguage, and the proliferation of handbooks. He will attempt to show what is wrong with all those things, why we should care and possibly how to fix them.
Slavomír Čéplö earned his PhD in Mathematical Linguistics from the Charles University in Prague in 2018. He has published on Maltese, Arabic dialectology, creole linguistics, and Christian apocrypha. He has been collaborating with the Department of Maltese for a number of years.
Dr Slavomír Čéplö’s lecture is open to staff, students and the general public and those who would like to attend do not need to register in advance.
This event, which is being coordinated by Prof. Michael Spagnol, is available on Facebook.