First Tragedy, then Parse: History Repeats Itself in the New Era of Large Language Models

arXiv:2311.05020v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Many NLP researchers are experiencing an existential crisis triggered by the astonishing success of ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs). After such a disruptive change to our understanding of the field, what is left to do? Taking a historical lens, we look for guidance from the first era of LLMs, which began in 2005 with large $n$-gram models for machine translation (MT). We identify durable lessons from the first era, and …

abstract arxiv change chatgpt crisis cs.cl history language language models large language large language models llms nlp researchers success systems type understanding