Language and Language Technology

We all use, think, discuss and learn languages. BUT have you ever wondered how scientists, called linguists, study language and how computational linguists use what we know about language to build language models? Maybe you have thought about:

how does language emerge?

how do adults use language and understand language?

how does language change?

how do the things that we know about language contribute to building language technology like ChatGPT?

how do language models and artificial intelligence like ChatGPT work?

If so, join us for a camp focussing on investigating language used by humans and dissecting the way language technology works. 

When?

Monday, July 15 to Friday, July 19, 2024

1:00 - 4:00pm.

Who?

This camp is for students aged 11-14 years.

Cost

The camp fee is $295 (including tax).

If the fee is a barrier to your participation, a limited number of bursaries are available for eligible families - please email [email protected] to inquire.

Where?

The Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST) - 1490 West Broadway,Vancouver, BC.

Why should you attend?

Learn from UBC linguists and language scientists about the origins and the future of language.

Discover how machine learning works, especially for tools like ChatGPT through fun and interactive experiments.

Experiment with tools like eye trackers and create your own sign language.

Earn a certificate of completion from the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology.

What will you learn?

Language emergence: Learn about how languages emerge. We will explore this topic through creating our own sign language.

Language Processing: Using language requires us to use our short term memory in all sorts of fascinating ways. We will talk about how human memory works, and how we use it to process language on the fly in everyday life. We will explore how language experiments work and design our own. We learn how to use an eye tracker.

Ai & Language models:  How does language modeling work and what role has it played in creating tools like ChatGPT? What er the shortcomings of Large Language Models, such as data biases that propagate through the models? How we can ethically source data and create tools.

Camp Instructor

Dr. Amanda Cardoso is a sociolinguist in the Linguistics Department at University of British Columbia. One of her research areas focuses on language attitudes, which are the different opinions about the way that people speak (their dialects or languages). These attitudes relate to associations that people have to the specific groups that use these dialects or languages and may have real-world effects. For example, dialects or languages that are considered the “best” or “most official” are often heard more in media (like in news, shows, and radio). Dr. Cardoso's work looks at the judgments of different accents and how the way we speak might affect these judgements, the effects that attitudes about accents have for employment opportunities, how biases that are built into speech technology related to language attitudes, and the (often unconscious) biases in methods for studying languages and accents. 

Dr. Christopher Hammerly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UBC, and a member of the White Earth Nation of Minnesota. His work focuses on the theory of how adults understand sentence structure (syntax) and word structure (morphology), as well as how we can use these theories to build tools and resources for Indigenous language revitalization.”

Additional Notes

Refund policy: Email us at least 2 weeks (14 days) prior to the start of the camp for a full refund.

VISST reserves the right to cancel camps and refund camp fees due to low enrolment. In this event, we will provide as much advance notice as possible.

Questions?

Please email [email protected]