At the turn of the 20th century, a famous horse named Clever Hans toured Germany. The horse stunned crowds as his trainer demonstrated the animal's alleged ability to understand German, tell time and ...

Science shows that dogs learn to form mental representations of words, shedding light on why they often seem to grasp our conversations. Nothing quite captures the heart like videos of dogs appearing ...

Ph.D. candidate Yuchen Lian (LIACS) wants to understand why human languages look the way they do—and find inspiration to ...

This article talks about how Large Language Models (LLMs) delve into their technical foundations, architectures, and uses in ...

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. It’s very easy to misread and overestimate achievements in artificial ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

The desire to communicate with pets is a long-held dream among many loving owners. When it comes to our most common companions, we continue to learn how dogs understand our words and what cat noises ...

The tech behind Parsey McParseface is now available to help developers create apps, like intelligent assistants and chatbots, that understand human language Google’s intelligent cloud developer tools ...

While we’d like to think that we intuitively understand language (we are after all, the “creators” of language), an analysis of how LLMs apparently “create” “meaning” suggests otherwise. Understanding ...

In their classic 1998 textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Ivry, and George Mangun made a sobering observation: there was no clear mapping between how we process language and ...