中央研究院 Logo

[史語所專題演講]

主辦單位：本院關鍵突破計劃「人工智慧時代的創作——跨領域的探索」
協辦單位：史語所文化思想史研究室
備註：本演講以英文進行，無需事先報名。

摘要：
This talk highlights the creativity underlying an apparently trivial everyday human activity: everyday conversation. It discusses the sophistication of the linguistic mechanisms involved in this activity in relation to the current surge of artificial conversational agents, grounded in Large Language Models. The talk then focuses on "conversational completions": situations in which one speaker terminates an utterance initiated by another speaker. This phenomenon will be used to approach traditional linguistic and cognitive units of language analysis from a radically dialogic perspective.
Conversational completions are especially interesting because they question the idea that utterances in a conversation are produced and understood by isolated individuals. The talk concludes by discussing whether humans, while performing these completions, are less predictable and more variable than artificial agents. Taking a broader perspective, we ask whether this higher variability is part of what makes conversation human. It argues that human conversational creativity may lie not purely in producing novel linguistic forms, but to find creative solutions to conversational challenges in real time, under linguistic, pragmatic, and social constraints.