SRI Seminar Series: Kyle Mahowald, “How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models”

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Kyle Mahowald, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin whose research spans computational linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning.

In this talk, Mahowald will explore how experiments with filtered pretraining and mechanistic interpretability can shed light on the structure of human language. By using language models as tools for scientific inquiry, his work investigates whether—and how—these systems can offer meaningful insights into the mechanisms of human language processing.

Talk title

“How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models”

Abstract

Language models have become adept at generating fluent and grammatically coherent English, prompting fundamental questions about whether their performance can inform our understanding of human language processing. I will describe a few recent experiments from my group, on how we can use filtered pretraining and mechanistic interpretability techniques to understand linguistic structure. Drawing from these findings and broader theoretical arguments in a recent position piece, I will argue that these kinds of experiments are linguistically informative.

Moderator: Avery Slater, Department of Literature and Drama

Registration

To register for the event, visit the official event page.

About Kyle Mahowald

Kyle Mahowald is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include learning about human language from language models, as well as efficiency-based explanations of human language. Mahowald has published in computational linguistics (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL), machine learning (e.g., NeurIPS), and cognitive science (e.g., Trends in Cognitive Science, Cognition) venues. He has won Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2023, 2024, and 2025; a Best Paper Award at ACL; and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award. He holds an M.Phil. in linguistics from Oxford, a Ph.D. from MIT in cognitive science, and did his postdoctoral training in the Stanford Natural Language Processing group.

About the SRI Seminar Series

The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.

Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.