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I entered the #ComputationalLinguistics field in 2018 by enrolling for a Bachelor's degree.
Since then, a lot has changed. Almost all the things we learned about, programmed in practice and did research on are now nearly irrelevant in our day-to-day.
Everything is #LLMs now. Every paper, every course, every student project.
And the newly enrolled students changed, too. They're no longer language nerds, they're #AI bros.
I miss #CompLing before ChatGPT.
Remember when we programmed "conversational robots" (like Siri or Alexa) in a way that we could actually control exactly what is being parsed, understood, and output?
When we could manually decide that if the user asks for the weather, the device is going to consult a weather data API as an actual real vetted information source?
When we programmed them to be *useful* for *tasks* and *information retrieval*, rather than being amazed that they're "talking" in a *convincing* manner?
It's crazy!
If you told one of our robots "hey, please call Lucia but before that see whether her birthday collides with anything on my calendar", it would actually work!
And we could look into the state of the machine and see what it interpreted your intent to be.
Something like "Get date:'birthday' from contact:'Lucia' and check events @ calendar:date, ask user confirmation, then call contact:'Lucia'".
It *had* understanding, context, knowledge. We threw that all out for a word generator!!
@lianna I miss parsing, semantic tagging, translational memory, lattice transforms... Hell I miss the incessant overtuning to the Penn Tree Bank corpus
It's all been mulched into a pile of perceptrons, representation is latent, interpretation is hidden, answers without question, questions without answers
@the_dot_matrix hey, i like perceptrons :(
@lianna true, I shouldn't blame the actually useful foundations of ML for the Akira-esque way they've been wired up
@the_dot_matrix My current ""weekend"" project is setting up an old laptop I got from some jumble sale with some contemporary (~2001?) Linux distribution, and using that authentic early 2000s system to program a language detection classifier perceptron by hand.
No libraries, no IDEs, no internet, just pure bliss.
@lianna if you're willing to share more about it, I'd love to see it. This area is not my forte, but I appreciate learning about it c:
@the_dot_matrix Once I start the project for real, I want to make some videos about it tracking my journey. I'll make sure to post them here. :)