LCSL Faculty Presentations at Data Science at the Crossroads of Language, Literature, and Society Conference
April 22, 2026
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
Daley Library, 1-470
Calendar
Download iCal FileData Science at the Crossroads of Language, Literature, and Society
Location and Time: Daley Library, 1-470, April 22 at 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Registration: https://go.uic.edu/Crossroads_LAS
(Light morning refreshments and lunch provided)
Structurally Savvy, Meaningfully Naïve: Limits of Large Language Models in Capturing Human Language Dynamics
Gyu-Ho Shin (Ph.D.), Assistant Professor of Linguistics
LMs have gained attention for approximating human language behavior, but research remains heavily concentrated on a narrow set of languages and limited contexts. This talk examines how well LLMs model sentence comprehension in Korean, using surprisal to compare model predictions with human data. The findings reveal both strengths and limitations of LLMs, highlighting the need for broader cross-linguistic evaluation.
Mapping the Contemporary German Novel with Gemini, 2001–2025
Patrick Fortmann (Ph.D.), Professor of Germanic Studies
This talk is based on the analysis of over 6,000 German-language book blurbs and
reviews (2001–2025) using LLM-extracted metadata to map literary trends and propose a
data-driven literary history. By extracting features such as genre, theme, tone, and
setting, and applying clustering methods, the study identifies large-scale literary
typologies and highlights how patterns of representation emerge through paratexts
rather than traditional methods.
Date posted
Apr 16, 2026
Date updated
Apr 16, 2026