Ellie Pavlick and NLP

A chance encounter with a computer scientist who happened to work in natural language processing led Pavlick to embark on her doctoral work studying how computers could encode semantics, or meaning in language. 

“I think it scratched a certain itch,” she said. “It dips into philosophy, and that fits with a lot of the things I’m currently working on.” 

Now, one of Pavlick’s primary areas of research focuses on “grounding” — the question of whether the meaning of words depends on things that exist independently of language itself, such as sensory perceptions, social interactions, or even other thoughts. 

Language models are trained entirely on text, so they provide a fruitful platform for exploring how grounding matters to meaning. But the question itself has preoccupied linguists and other thinkers for decades.

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