Minutes from the eleventh WG 14 meeting (online 2025-05-06 12:00 CET)

Agenda

Invited talk by Juri Alexander Opitz on “Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguistics” by Opitz. et al. 2025

Discussion on the use of LLMs within Unidive

Task 3.5: Evaluation campaign AdMIRe Advancing Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation call for language leaders and annotators by Aline Villavicencio

The invited talk by Prof. Juri Alexander Opitz on “Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguistics” by Opitz. et al. 2025

Juri Opitz is a researcher in computational linguistics at the University of Zurich, where he works on semantic structures and search as part of an interdisciplinary research project. He completed his PhD at Heidelberg University in 2024, focusing on metrics for meaning representations and their application to NLP tasks like evaluation of parsing and generation, as well as explainable semantic search. You can find more at www.juriopitz.com.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise in NLP? We highlight several aspects in which NLP (still) relies on linguistics, or where linguistic thinking can illuminate new directions. We argue our case around the acronym RELIES, which encapsulates six major facets where linguistics contributes to NLP: Resources, Evaluation, Low-resource settings, Interpretability, Explanation, and the Study of language. This list is not exhaustive, nor is linguistics the main point of reference for every effort under these themes; but at a macro level, these facets highlight the enduring importance of studying machine systems vis-a-vis systems of human language.

List of Participants

Joakim Nivre (co-chair)

Gülşen Eryiğit (co-chair)

Dan Flickinger

Francis Bond

Jan Odijk

Ranka Stanković

Eri Papanikolaou

Verginica Mititelu

Danka Jokic

Rusudan Makhachashvili

Olha Kanishcheva

Maria Shvedova

Kutay Acar

Gosse Bouma

Voula Giouli

Sara Stymne

Aline Villavicencio

Ilan Kernerman

Radovan Garabík

Federica Gamba

Doğukan Arslan

Arianna Bienati

Miryam de Lhoneux

Irina Lobzhanidze

Kaja Dobrovoljc

Yevheniia Dehtiarova

Maria Alexandra Roussopoulou

Oleksandr Yakymchuk

Dan Zeman

Adriana Pagano

Faruk Mardan

Andrew Dyer

Kristina Kocijan

Serge Sharoff

Rodrigo Wilkens

Olena Yurchenko

Agata Savary

Victoria Musiichuk

Alla Syniavska

Martin Benjamin

Nataliya Magas