YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Gibson

lines on the record: 228
first: 2024-04-17
most recent: 2024-04-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't know. Maybe I'm just being loose there. I think it's not a great theory, but it's a theory. It's a good theory in one sense in that it covers all the data. Like anything you want to say in English, it does. And so that's why that's how it's arguably the best is that no other theory is as good as a large language model in predicting exactly what's good and what's bad in English. Now you're saying, is it a good theory? Well, probably not, you know, because I want a smaller theory than that. It's too big. I agree.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a kind of a big theory, but the reason it's arguably the best is that it does the best at predicting what's English, for instance. It's incredibly good. It's better than any other theory. There's not enough detail.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in language because language allows a lot of expression, but it's just you don't need it for thinking. It suggests that language is separate, is a separate system.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any task just fine, but not language. You can't talk to them. I mean, they don't understand you. They can't speak. You can't write. They can't read, but they can do, they can play chess, they can drive their cars, they can do all kinds of other stuff, do math, they can do all, so math is not in the language area, for instance. You do arithmetic and stuff. That's not language area. It's got symbols. So people sort of confuse some kind of symbolic processing with language. And symbolic processing is not the same. So there are symbols and they have meaning, but it's not language. It's not a you know, conventionalized language system. And so math isn't there. And so they can do math. They do just as well as their control, age match controls, and all these tasks. This is Rosemary Varley over in University College London, who has a bunch of patients who she's shown this, that they're just, so that sort of combination suggests that language isn't necessary for thinking. It doesn't mean you can't think in language.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one set, one set of data from Federanko's group is that no matter what task you do, if it doesn't have words and combinations of words in it, then it won't light up the language network. It'll be active somewhere else, but not there. So that's one. And then this other piece of evidence relevant to that question is it turns out there are these group of people who've had massive stroke on the left side and wiped out their language network. And as long as they didn't wipe out everything on the right as well, in that case, they wouldn't be cognitively functionable. But if they just wiped out language, which is pretty tough to do because it's very expensive on the left, but if they have, then there is patients like this so-called global aphasics who can do”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Majority of people, majority, absolutely, but it's like two thirds or three quarters. It's what I never ask class. And I went internet, they always say that. So you're in a minority.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people have this sense that they hear themselves and then say they read someone's email. I've heard people tell me that they hear that this other person's voice when they read other people's.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, isn't that cool? And that's so interesting. So people, I mean, this is like hard to do experiments on, but there is this idea of inner voice. And a lot of people have an inner voice. And so if you do a poll on the internet and ask if you hear self-talking when you're just thinking or whatever, about 70 or 80% of people will say yes, most people have an inner voice. I don't. And so I always find this strange. So when people talk about an inner voice, I always thought this was a metaphor. And they hear, I know most of you whoever's listening to this thinks I'm crazy now because I don't have an inner voice and I just don't know what you're listening to. It sounds so kind of annoying to me, but to have this voice going on while you're thinking, but I guess most people have that. And I don't have that. And we don't really know what that connects to.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's connections right between what these things mean, and then there's probably other parts of the brain that what these things mean. And so, you know, when I'm talking about whatever it is I want to talk about, if it'll be represented somewhere else, that knowledge of whatever that is will be represented somewhere else.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what it has to be doing. So it's doing in communication. It is translating from thought, whatever that is, is more abstract. And it's doing that. That's what it's doing. That is kind of what it is doing. It's kind of a meaning network, I guess.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's people that speak those languages. They really speak those languages because the people that wrote. The languages for the shows, they did an amazing job of constructing something like a human language. And that lights up the language. That's like because they can speak pretty much arbitrary thoughts in a human language. It's a constructed human language and it probably it's related to human languages because the people that are constructing them were making them like human languages in various ways. But it also activates the same network, which is pretty, pretty cool. Anyway.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, another fascinating little tidbit is that even if they're these constructed languages like Klingon or I don't know the languages from Game of Thrones. I'm sorry. I don't remember those languages.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty cool. That's weird. It is amazing. And so that's like one set of days. This is hers shows that you might think is thinking is not language. Language is just this conventionalized system that we've worked out in human languages.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you're a really good programmer, that is not a human language, it's just not conveying the same information. And so it is not in the language network.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's there. You speak multiple languages. The same network is going for your multiple languages. So you speak English, you speak Russian. Both of them are hitting that same network if you're affluent in those languages.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much. There are words in there There's function words and stuff, so it's lower activation. Yeah, yeah. So there's like basically the more language like it is, the higher it goes in the language network. And that network is there from when you speak as soon as you learn language.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The network such that you're doing some kind of production, and I can't remember what they've done a bunch of different kinds of tasks there where you get people to produce things, yeah, figure out how to produce, and the same network goes on there, exactly the same place.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this network doesn't make any difference if it's written or spoken. So the thing that she calls, Federernco calls the language network is this high-level language. So it's not about the spoken language, and it's not about the written language. It's about either one of them. And so when you do speech, you listen to speech and you subtract away some language you don't understand. And or you subtract away backward speech, which sounds like speech, but isn't. And then so you take away the sound part altogether. And so, and then if you do written, you get exactly the same network. So for just reading the language versus reading sort of nonsense words or something like that, you'll find exactly the same network. And so this is about high level comprehension of language, yeah, in this case. And the same thing happens. Production is a little harder to run the scanner, but the same thing happens in production. You get the same network. So production's a little harder, right? You have to figure out how do you run a task.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyways, we're back to the scanner, and I can find my network in 15 minutes, and now we can ask, find my network, find yours.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know. That's a very hard question. They're working on that right now because of the problem scanning little kids, like trying to do local, trying to do the localization on little children in this scanner. You're lying in the ephemeris scan. That's the best way to figure out where something's going on inside our brains. And the scanner is loud and you're in this tiny little area. You're claustrophobic. And it doesn't bother me at all. I can go sleep in there. But some people are bothered by it and little kids don't really like it. And they don't like to lie still and you have to be really still because you move around that messes up the coordinates of where everything is. And so, you know, try to get, you know, your question is, how and when are language developing? How does this left lateralized system come to play? And it's really hard to get a two-year-old to do this task. But you can maybe, they're starting to get three and four and five year olds to do this task for short periods. And it looks like it's there pretty early”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's incredibly stable. So I happen to be married to this woman at Federengo. And so I've been scanned by her over and over and over since 2007 or 6 or something. And so my language network is exactly the same ago as it was back in 2007. It's amazingly stable. It's astounding. It's a really fundamentally cool thing. So my language network is like my face. It's not changing much over time inside my head.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sentences. You know, I'm listening to English of any kind story, or I can read sentences, anything at all that I understand, if I understand it, then it'll activate my language network. So right now my language network is going like crazy when I'm talking and when I'm listening to you because we're both we're communicating.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What language is okay? And so, as I mentioned earlier, you can localize my language area, your language area in a few minutes. Okay, like 15 minutes, I can listen to language, listen to non-language or backward speech or something, and we'll find areas left lateralized network in my head, which is very sensitive to language as opposed to whatever that control was.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you or anyone cast to think of a task which they think is a good thinking task. And there's lots and lots and tasks which would be good thinking tasks. And whatever those tasks are, let's say it's playing chess or that's a good thinking task or playing some game or doing some complex puzzles. Maybe. Maybe remembering some digits that's thinking, remembering some a lot of different tasks you might think. Maybe just listening to music is thinking. Or there's a lot of different tasks we might think of as thinking. There's a woman in my department, F. Federenco, and she's done a lot of work on this question about what's the connection between language and thought. And so she uses, I was referring earlier to MRI, FMRI, that's her primary method. And so she has been really fascinated by this question about whether”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that's why these large language models are so successful because they're good at form and form isn't that hard in some sense. And meaning is tough still. And that's why they don't understand what they're doing. We're going to talk about that later, maybe. But we can distinguish in our forget about large language models, like humans. Maybe you'll talk about that later too, is like the difference between language, which is a communication system and thinking, which is meaning. So language is a communication system for the meaning. It's not the meaning. And so that's why, I mean, and there's a lot of interesting evidence we can talk about relevant to that.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's changing the meaning. But say, even if we keep that constant, we can still talk about what's easier or hard for me, right? The listener and the which phrase structures I use, which combinations, which, you know.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They entered the room. Hey, the room was entered by something, the thing that was entered was two dogs. I mean, that's kind of awkward and weird and stuff, but those are all similar messages with different forms, different ways I might frame. And of course, I use the same words there all the time. I could have referred to the dogs as, you know, a Dalmatian and a poodle or something. I could have been more specific or less specific about what they are. And I could have said been more abstract about the number. There's like, so I'm trying to keep the meaning, which is this event constant. And then how am I going to describe that to get that to you? It kind of depends on what you need to know, right? And what I think you need to know. But I'm like, let's control for all that stuff and not. And I'm just like choosing, but I'm doing something simpler than you're doing, which is just forms.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But look, for any event, There's an unbounded. I don't want to say infinite, but sort of ways that I might communicate that same event. This two dogs entered a room, I can say, in many, many different ways. I can say, hey, there's two dogs”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the meaning. So I'm still talking about the form, just the form of the meaning. How do I frame the form of the meaning is all I'm talking about. You're talking about a harder thing, I think. It's like, how am I... Like trying to change the let's keep the meaning constant”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's patrol for what it is I want to say. I'm saying let's control for the thing, the message. Control for the message.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the syntax, for the combinations, it's just about me. I feel like it's, I don't know, though, it's very, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, but.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have different census, I guess. I'm very selfish. And I'm like, I think it's like it's all about me. I'm like, I'm just doing the easiest for me. I'm like, I mean, but I have to, of course, choose the words that I think you're going to know. I'm not going to choose words you don't know. In fact, I'm going to fix that. So there it's about, but maybe for.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The production and the. But I would guess it's probably evolved for production, it's about producing, it's what's easier for me to say that ends up being easier for you also. That's a very hard to disentangle this idea of who is it for? Is it for me, the speaker, or is it for you, the listener? I mean, part of my language is for you. Like the way I talk to you is going to be different from how I talk to different people. I'm definitely angling what I'm saying to who I'm saying, right? It's not like I'm just talking the same way to every single person. And so I am sensitive to my audience. But how does that work itself out in the dependency length differences? I don't know. Maybe that's about just the words, that part, you know, which words I select?”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I just mean each of language production. It's easier for me to say things when I'm doing, whenever I'm talking to you, somehow I'm formulating some idea in my head and I'm putting these words together. And it's easier for me to do that. To say something where the words are closely connected in a dependency as opposed to separated, like by putting something in between and over and over again. It's just hard for me to keep that in my head. Like that's the whole story. This story, it's basically the dependency grammar sort of gives that to you, like just like long as bad, short is good. It's like easier to keep in mind because you have to keep it in mind for probably for production probably matters in comprehension as well, like also matters in comprehension.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. So, I mean, the story here is just about communication. It is just about production, really. It's about ease of production is the story.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scrambling so that it only gives you projective sort of non cross is the same thing holds. So you still human languages are much shorter than this kind of a control. So there's like, what it means is that in every language, we're trying to put things close relative to this kind of a control. It doesn't matter about the word order. Some of these are verb final. Some of them use a verb media-like English. And some are even verb initial. There are a few languages of the world which have VSO, world order, verb, subject, object languages. Haven't talked about those. It's like 10%.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the dependency lengths are always shorter in the real language compared to this kind of a control. And there's another, it's a little more rigid, his control. The way I described it, you could have crossed dependencies, like by scrambling that way, you could scramble in any way at all. Languages don't do that. They tend not to cross dependencies very much. So the dependency structure, they tend to keep things non-crossed. There's a technical term. They call that projective, but it's just non-crossed is all that is projective. And so if you just constrain...”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, two dogs entered the room, so entered is the root, and entered has two dependents. It's got dogs, and it has room. And what he does is like, let's scramble that order. That's three things, the root and the head and the two dependents into some random order, just random. And then just do that for all the dependents down the two. So now look, do it for the whatever was two in dogs and for in room. And that's, you know, that's not, it's a very short sentence. When sentences get longer and you have more dependence, there's more scrambling that's possible. And what he found was, so that, so that's one, you could figure out one scrambling for that sentence. He did this like a hundred times for every sentence in every one of these texts, every corpus. And then he just compared the dependency lengths in those random scramblings to what actually happened, what the English or the French or the German was in the original language or Chinese or what all these like 80 languages.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All languages have short dependencies. You can actually measure that. So an ex-student of mine, this guy is at University of California, Irvine, Richard Futrell, did a thing a bunch of years ago now where he looked at all the languages we could look at, which was about 40 initially. And now I think there's about 60 for which there are dependency structures. So they're meaning there's got to be like a big text, a bunch of texts, which have been parsed for their dependency structures. And there's about 60 of those which have been parsed that way. And for all of those, what he did was take any sentence in one of those languages, and you can do the dependency structure and then start at the root. We're talking about dependency structures. That's pretty easy now. And he's trying to figure out what a control way you might say the same sentence is in that language. And so we just like, all right, there's a root and it has, let's say as a sentence is, let's go back to.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's easier when you stare at it. If you look, it's a little easier than listening, it's pretty tough because you have to, because there's no trace of it, you have to remember the words that I'm saying, which is very hard auditorily. We wouldn't do it this way. You do it written. You can look at it and figure it out. It's easier in many dimensions in some ways depending on the person. It's easier to gather written data for, I mean, most sort of I work in psycholinguistics, right? Psychology of language and stuff. And so a lot.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was good, you know, that's a very simple completion for that. If I give that completion online somewhere to a crowdsourcing platform and ask people to complete that, they will miss off of a verb very regularly, like half the time, maybe two-thirds of the time. They'll say they'll just leave off one of those verb phrases. Even with that simple, so say the book, which the author who, and they'll say was they won't have that you need three verbs, right? I need three verbs or who I met, wrote. Was good and they'll give me two. They'll say, who was famous was good or something like that. They'll just give me two. And they'll happen about 60% of the time. So 40%, maybe 30, they'll do it correctly, meaning they'll do a three verb phrase. I don't know what's correct or not. This is hard. It's a hard task. Yeah.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why you could say them. So, if you give them a partial sentence, say I say the book Which the author who, and I ask you to now finish that off for me. I mean, either say it. Yeah, yeah, but you can just put it say it's written in front of you and you can just type in have as much time as you want. They will, even though that one's not too hard, right? So if I say it's like the book, it's like, oh, the book which the author who I met wrote.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, you could. I mean, there's multiple ways to do that. I mean, there's the simplest ways just ask people how good does it sound? How natural is the sound? That's a very blunt, but very good measure. It's very, very reliable. People will do the same thing. And so it's like, I don't know what it means exactly, but it's doing something such that we're measuring something about the confusion, the difficulty associated with those.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of that, no, nesting is the same thing central bedding, those are totally equivalent terms. I'm sorry, I sometimes use one and sometimes anything different.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can they understand them? Another method you can do is give people partial materials and ask them to complete them, those centro-embedded materials, and they'll fail. So I've done that. I've done all these kinds of things.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm giving you two kinds of explanations. I'm telling you that centrum bedding that's nesting, those are the same synonyms for the same concept here. And the explanation for those are always hard. Centrum bedding and nesting are always hard. And I gave you an explanation for why they might be hard, which is long distance connections. When you do centrum bedding, when you do nesting, you always have long distance connections between the dependents. So that's not necessarily the right explanation. I can go through reasons why that's probably a good explanation. And it's not really just about one of them. So probably it's a pair of them or something of these dependents that you get long that drives you to like be really confused in that case. And so what the behavioral consequence there, I mean, this is kind of methods. Like, how do we get at this? You could try to do experiments to get people to produce these things. They're going to have a hard time producing them. You can try to experiments to get them to understand them and see how well they understand.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will have a hard time either producing or comprehending it. They might tell you that's not their language, you know, it's sort of the language. I mean, it following, like, they'll agree with each of those pieces is part of their language, but somehow that combination will be very, very difficult to produce and understand.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I'll just say words. Your words are morphemes between. We don't know that. Actually, that's a very good question. What is the distance metric? But let's just say it's words, sure.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's horrendous in any language. So no matter what language you look at, if you do, just figure out some structure where I'm going to have some modification following some head which is connected to some later head. And I do it again. It won't be good. Guaranteed. Like 100% that will be uninterpretable in that language in the same way that was uninterpretable in English.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a subject connected to a verb there, and then I'm modifying that with a clause, another clause, which happens to have a subject in a verb relation. I'm trying to do that again on the second one. And what that does is it lengthens out the multiple dependence actually get lengthened out there. The dependencies get longer, and the outside ones get long, and even the ones in between get kind of long. And you just, so what's fascinating is that's really horrendous in English.”
2024-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source