Next Loria Colloquium will take place on Thursday, 26th June at 1:30 pm in Loria’s amphitheater.
We will have the pleasure to welcome Alexander Koller, Professor of Computational Linguistics at
Saarland University, for a presentation in English, entitled Solving complex problems with large language models.
One of the great promises that people connect with LLMs is that they can make complex problem-solving with computers accessible to lay users. Unlike traditional symbolic solvers (e.g. for planning or linear programming), LLMs accept natural-language input and require no expert training; unlike earlier task-oriented dialogue systems, they can be applied across arbitrary domains.
In my talk, I will explore the degree to which LLMs are already fulfilling this promise. I will present recent work on whether current LLMs “reason” or “recite”, discuss the role of symbolic representations in LLM-based problem-solving, and offer some thoughts on trustworthy problem-solving with LLMs.
Alexander Koller is a Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research interests include planning and reasoning with LLMs, syntactic and semantic processing, natural language generation, and dialogue systems. He is particularly interested in neurosymbolic models that bring together principled linguistic modeling and correctness guarantees with the coverage and robustness of neural approaches. Alexander received his PhD from Saarland University and was previously a postdoc at Columbia University and the University of Edinburgh, faculty at the University of Potsdam, and Visiting Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI.
