Conference: Promoting the intersection of language and computer sciences to advance brain-inspired artificial intelligence

Computational linguistics – such as creating technology that can learn human language – has been central to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). This conference grant brings together researchers from linguistics and computer science who study computational linguistics from different perspectives. Bringing these communities together enhances the nation’s AI workforce by broadening researchers’ expertise and, in the long term, providing a path towards developing AI that learns human language more efficiently. This is beneficial because it can reduce the costs involved in training and using AI, and because it supports the development of AI that understands a wider variety of languages. Having AI that learns like humans do could also provide a new tool for studying how humans learn language, leading to improved interventions for language disorders and more effective teaching of second languages in adulthood. Other benefits to society include educational opportunities for trainees that support workforce development for the AI and other language technology sectors. The conference grant supports the co-location of a premier conference on computational models of human language with a premier conference on language technology. This is the first time that the two conferences have been co-located. The conference features keynote speakers that do cutting-edge research at the intersection of both communities and a panel that directly addresses opportunities for integrating the two research areas. Conference scholarships enable researchers to attend both conferences, which allows researchers to engage in an extended period of critical interdisciplinary education and engagement. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.