Inaccessible Neural Language Models Could Reinvigorate Linguistic Nativism

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been making big waves in the machine learning community within the past few years. The impressive scalability of LLMs due to the advent of deep learning can be seen as a continuation of empiricist lingusitic methods, as opposed to rule-based linguistic methods that are grounded in a nativist perspective. Current LLMs are generally inaccessible to resource-constrained researchers, due to a variety of factors including closed source code. This work argues that this lack of accessibility could instill a nativist bias in researchers new to computational linguistics, given that new researchers may only have rule-based, nativist approaches to study to produce new work. Also, given that there are numerous critics of deep learning claiming that LLMs and related methods may soon lose their relevancy, we speculate that such an event could trigger a new wave of nativism in the language processing community. To prevent such a dramatic shift and placing favor in hybrid methods of rules and deep learning, we call upon researchers to open source their LLM code wherever possible to allow both empircist and hybrid approaches to remain accessible.

Computational Choreography using Human Motion Synthesis

Should deep learning models be trained to analyze human performance art? To help answer this question, we explore an application of deep neural networks to synthesize artistic human motion. Problem tasks in human motion synthesis can include predicting the motions of humans in-the-wild, as well as generating new sequences of motions based on said predictions. We will discuss the potential of a less traditional application, where learning models are applied to predicting dance movements. There have been notable, recent efforts to analyze dance movements in a computational light, such as the Everybody Dance Now (EDN) learning model and a recent Cal Poly master's thesis, Take The Lead (TTL). We have effectively combined these two works along with our own deep neural network to produce a new system for dance motion prediction, image-to-image translation, and video generation.