Events
Colloquium
Formal Models of Language Generation
 |
Speaker: Jon Kleinberg (Cornell) Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science Cornell University Tuesday, April 28, 2026 12:00PM - 1:00PM Lunch 11:30am in 1307
Talk 12:00pm-1:00pm in 1327 Location: Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science Common Area, Kline Tower 13th Floor, New Haven, CT 06511 and via Webcast: https://yale.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8aed5733-edf8-47b9-8582-b439013ac455 |
Abstract: The emergence of large language models has prompted a surge of interest into theoretical models that might give us insight into both their successes and their shortcomings. We’ll give an overview of recent work in this direction, focusing on a surprising line of positive results that shows it is possible to give guarantees for language-generation algorithms even in the absence of any probabilistic assumptions, in a framework known as “language generation in the limit”. These results suggest interesting notions of breadth in language generation, attempting to formalize the idea that different algorithms for this problem might all meet the specification but differ significantly in their expressiveness — in how richly they can generate from the underlying language. We also discuss strong contrasts with classical results on language identification, showing a strong sense in which language generation and language learning are fundamentally different as computational problems. The talk will be based on joint work with Sendhil Mullainathan and Fan Wei.
Speaker Bio: Jon Kleinberg is a professor in both computer science and information science. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other online media. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Add To: Google Calendar | Outlook | iCal File
- Colloquium
- Student Led Seminar
Submit an Event
Interested in creating your own event, or have an event to share? Please fill the form if you’d like to send us an event you’d like to have added to the calendar.