Language, Language Models, and What We're Talking About

2026-09-03

AI Summary

论文探讨了通过翻译和合成数据训练的语言模型的本质，提出需明确区分技术产品与语言研究工具，以确定我们期望语言模型产生的语言类型。

Abstract

Language models are commonly discussed as technical artefacts, but they are obviously shaped by the linguistic worlds conveyed by data during their training. Using Italian language models as evidence, I want to bring attention to the nature of the systems which result from training and specialising models on translated and synthetic data, and further curating them, and to the meaning of testing them on equally unnatural data. Are these eventually models of Italian? Are they models of language? Does NLP still care about language? These questions yield another, more concrete question: what language do we actually want language models to produce? I argue that this question cannot be answered if we do not first consider a clearer distinction between language models designed as technical products and language models designed as tools for studying language itself. The answers then might be diverse, the languages we are talking about might be diverse, and the picture might not be as pessimistic as we fear.

Problem

• Language Models
• Translated Data
• Synthetic Data
• Italian Language
• NLP

Innovation

• language models
• synthetic data
• translated data
• Italian language