"The future belongs to linguists." A Literature, Language and Computing conference takes place at St Petersburg University
The first international LiLaC (Literature — Language — Computing: Russian Contribution) conference was held at St Petersburg University. Presentations were made by representatives of various universities from Russia and abroad.
At the opening, Mikhail Koryshev, Dean of the Faculty of Philology of St Petersburg University, delivered a welcoming address. He noted the importance of traditions in the life of the University. ’I think that we are witnessing a new tradition today. We will try to make sure that things usually done by our experts in the field of computational linguistics and speech technologies would become our common heritage,’ Dean Koryshev said. He explained that the methods and findings of domain experts gathered at the conference could be useful for researchers in other areas of philology.
One of the plenary reports titled "The Human in the Digital Age: The Brain and the World" was presented at the conference by Professor Tatiana Chernigovskaya, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at St Petersburg University and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Education. She spoke about the rapidly accelerating and changing world that humanity has already faced. According to the expert, this new reality carries both threats and opportunities.
If there were no digital technologies, how could we have survived COVID and the lockdown restrictions? If there were no language databases, huge repositories of vocabulary, grammar and so on, what would happen? There is no linguist who could collect themselves such data as, for instance, the Russian National Corpus contains.
Professor Tatiana Chernigovskaya, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at St Petersburg University and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Education
Professor Chernigovskaya added that various gadgets and devices are really useful for people. Yet, without personal involvement, they become useless and even dangerous.
In the digital age, technologies can be astounding and get beyond human capabilities. For example, there are programmes that can beat grandmasters in chess. ’When playing chess, today’s cutting-edge systems have learned to force the opponent into zugzwang. That is, when a person is sure that they are winning and everything is in order, the system is in fact leading them to a place that person cannot get out of. This is done not in an algorithmic way. It is something like intuition,’ explained Tatiana Chernigovskaya. Moreover, such software is able to beat humans not only in chess, but also in games such as Go or poker.
At the same time, according to the scholar, artificial intelligence will still not be able to master everything that is subject to the human mind. ’For us linguists, it is clear that any text is interpreted depending on a thousand contexts, such as: who wrote it; when it was written; who reads it; what the writer and the reader both know; and what kind of worldview they have. It is therefore not worth hoping that word processing systems will do everything quite right. They are very powerful; they do have the ability to play with contexts. Yet the poetry of Joseph Brodsky or Boris Pasternak will be too tough for them,’ Professor Chernigovskaya believes. Moreover, she highly appreciated the role of experts in linguistics in the future.
The main task of the human brain is to create meanings. In fact, the future belongs to linguists, because they will have to deal with concepts that have not yet existed on Earth.
Professor Tatiana Chernigovskaya, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at St Petersburg University and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Education
Summing up her report devoted to the human in the digital age, Professor Chernigovskaya once again drew the attention of the audience to the problems and threats that humanity is facing in the new reality. These are: information verification; the development of artificial intelligence and the danger that it ’overtakes’ the human one; a variety of cyber threats; and so on. ’We need to slow down a bit, stop rushing, and think. We need to understand the world we have found ourselves in and not add chaos to it because this place is full of chaos as it is,’ she summed up.
Another plenary report was devoted to machine translation in the communication system and educational space. It was presented by Larisa Belyaeva, Professor at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia and a graduate of Leningrad State University. She touched upon the history of machine translation first. 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the first ideas of researcher Warren Weaver. They were based on information theory, the success of code breaking during World War II, and theories about the universal principles underlying the natural language. She then spoke about modern requirements for the technological process of translation, and outlined the current problems associated with machine translation.
The LiLaC (Literature — Language — Computing: Russian Contribution) conference is held for the first time this year. The purpose of this event is to provide an opportunity for scientific dialogue to specialists who use computer technology in the study of the Russian language and Russian literature, as well as in comparative studies based on various languages.
Thus, for example, according to Larisa Belyaeva, students of translation at Russian universities are undertrained in terms of text editing. In addition, many teachers disapprove of machine translation to be used by students, particularly international students. The expert linguist believes that such systems should be taken into account in the educational process. ’Teachers should not turn a blind eye to machine translation and pretend that it does not exist. We need to teach our students how to use machine translation systems and look for effective ways to use them,’ Professor Belyaeva explained.
Aleksandr Piperski, Associate Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, presented the results of his study on the lexical diversity of Russian poets. ’I have already been studying the poetic sub-corpus of the Russian National Corpus with great enthusiasm for many years. I hope that the results of this work may really be of interest to the general public, who is fond of Russian poetry,’ he explained.
By using various approaches and techniques, the researcher analysed texts of 183 authors who lived in the 18th—21st centuries. Aleksandr Piperski came to the conclusion that lexical diversity increased throughout the history of Russian poetry. He assumes that it happened due to the expansion of topics. It is the range of topics that leads to lower lexical diversity in the texts of female poets if compared to the male ones. At the same time, women differ from men in the variety of nouns and verbs used, but not adjectives.