Scientific Events of the Lab

The workshop “Generalized additive mixed-effects modeling” taught by Joshua Krause (University of Groningen, Netherlands) within the ERC-IDDISC project takes place on November 05−06, 2024 from 9:00 to 14:30 in C7.2, meeting room 2.11. Sign up before October 25th: tinyurl.com/signup-gamm. The workshop details are here.

Joshua Krause (University of Groningen, Netherlands) gives a talk “Unraveling latent cognitive progresses: A new Approach for modeling experimental effects” within the ERC-IDDISC project on November 5th, 2024, from 15:00 to 16:00 in building C7 4, conference room 1.17. The talk details are here.

On April 24, 2024 Prof. Dr. Niels Taatgen (University of Groningen, Netherlands) gave a talk “Cognitive skills: the building blocks of human intelligence” in building A2.2, room 2.02 and MS Teams.

The talk abstract:
“Humans have the amazing capacity to perform new tasks with little or no instruction. To explain this remarkable ability, I propose that people, when faced with a new task, compose the necessary knowledge for that task using cognitive skills as  building blocks. In our cognitive modeling research, we have shown how a small set of skills can instantiated into a variety of task models, and provide explanations for phenomena such as attentional blink and task switching costs without having to rely on assumptions about limitations of the brain. If cognitive skills are the building blocks of cognition, is important to be able to identify them, and study how they are learned. To identify cognitive skills, we use a hybrid approach, in which we use bottom-up machine learning methods to use individual differences in student performance to construct a knowledge graph, in which each node represents a combination of skills, and a possible knowledge state of the student. A first pilot study has shown the benefits of this approach in teaching arithmetic to students in the Dutch Vocational education”.

On 19.03.2024 Prof. Dr. Michael Franke (University of Tübingen) gave a talk “Cognitive & Language Sciences in the age of Large Language Models” within the ERC-IDDISC project in building A2.2, room 1.20.2 and MS Teams.

The talk abstract:
“Powerful Large Language Models, like chatGPT, produce fluent, grammatically correct, interpretable and often relevant and useful language. This raises a brutal question: What do we need linguistic theory for if all of this can be achieved without? In my talk, I will dissect the most common reaction from theorists, namely the argument that LLMs are not explanatory models in the relevant sense. I attempt to better delineate what it is that makes a model explanatory. I then proceed to resent novel work-in-progress that attempts to build explanatory, hybrid models that combine theory-driven probabilistic models of pragmatic language use and interpretation with the open-endedness of LLMs”.

The Workshop on Individual Differences in Pragmatics and Discourse (IndiPRAG) organized by our lab within the ERC-IDDISC project took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken (Germany) on September 18−19, 2023. For more information, visit the workshop website.