A new research center has launched within the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences focused on the computational study of language. Directed by language science professor Richard Futrell, the Center for Language, Intelligence, and Computation is an institutional hub for researchers from linguistics, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, computer science, and engineering who are developing models that leverage our modern computational technologies such as large language models in order to understand human language and intelligence.

“Within the field at large, these efforts remain dispersed across departmental silos and methodological camps: symbolic parsing specialists rarely engage with deep‑learning researchers, psycholinguists often work apart from corpus linguists, and information‑theoretic modelers seldom collaborate with neuroscientists testing predictions in brain data,” says Futrell. “The center will provide an institutional home for this diversity of expertise, fostering sustained interaction among scholars who share the goal of understanding language as a scientific phenomenon through computational means.” 

Ideas explored by researchers under the auspices of the new center include what large language models can tell us about how language works; how humans generate, comprehend, and learn language; how language evolved and how languages change; the connection between language and thought; and the role of language in the formation of social structures. Bringing together varied approaches provides an opportunity to bring together strengths, reconcile differences, and move toward a comprehensive science of language, says Futrell.

“The center will serve as a catalyst for projects that span traditional boundaries, and UC Irvine is uniquely positioned to host this endeavor,” he says. “Our Department of Language Science excels in computational modeling applied to speech, learning, and pragmatics; the cognitive sciences department brings expertise in experimental design, Bayesian modeling, and neural data; and the Department of Computer Science and School of Engineering contribute leadership in machine learning and scalable architectures.”

“By co‑locating these strengths, the center will lower the barriers to collaboration: graduate students and postdocs will gain exposure to methods outside their home discipline, senior faculty will find new partners for interdisciplinary grant proposals, and the broader campus community will benefit from seminars and tutorials that demystify computational approaches to language.”

Planned activities include:

• Talk series: Invited talks by leading researchers in neural language modeling, psycholinguistics, and information theory, with broad campus outreach.
• Annual meetup: An annual, informal meet-up at the beginning of each year where affiliates can briefly give research updates on things that are most relevant for the mission of the center. 

Additionally, the center will sponsor UCI’s site for the US AI Olympiad, a programming contest for high-school students, providing mentorship and outreach to students who may be underrepresented in STEM.

Futrell adds: “By creating a vibrant intellectual ecosystem, complete with colloquia and collaborative training programs the center will accelerate discoveries about language structure, processing, and acquisition, and will train the next generation of scholars to navigate the full methodological spectrum of this dynamic field.”