Metonymic Language Models: Literary Data after AI

Join us for the next CESTA Tuesday lunch seminar, titled "Metonymic Language Models: Literary Data after AI" by Benjamin Glaser, Associate Professor of English at Yale University. This hybrid talk+workshop contrasts the organization of literary data—and the challenge of theorizing it—with Large Language Models’ implicit, task-determined theory of language. For example, poetry’s sub- and supra-lexical prosodic features (stress, meter, intonation) are not available to LLMs as phonology, but rather correlate to concatenations of words within certain genres (“sonnet,” “poetry”). Metaphors and similes correlate to the concatenations “x is/is like a y” or compounds like “x is a y that z’s.” These approximations of the Jakobsonian “poetic function” reflect training data, instruction tuning, and prompting strategies, but not literary data or aspects of language beyond word selection. What datasets could force attention to different linguistic and literary features, and what impact would (re)training on such data have on the broader behavior and meta-linguistic capacity of generative AI? To reach that point, we also need to determine strong computational methods for asserting the divergence (and perhaps convergence) of human and AI textuality. After an opening discussion and presentation on poetic meter, participants will be invited to consider how their disciplinary objects get projected into LLM data / vector space. We may explore: pre-training data, synthetic data, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and differences between models. While this talk focuses on text, we might also consider visual, audio, and multimodal models. RSVP for lunch or to receive the Zoom link here.

Note: a pre-circulated paper for the Stanford Workshop in Poetics (also Jan 14th, 3:30) may be of interest (there is overlap).

About the Speaker

Ben Glaser is associate professor of English at Yale University. His work appears in NLH, modernism/modernity, ELH, PMLA, Victorian Poetry, and other venues. He is the author of Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics(Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), and co-editor with Jonathan Culler of Critical Rhythm (Fordham UP, 2019). He studies Anglophone poetics and prosody, with research and teaching interests in sound studies, disability studies, African American and Caribbean poetry, computational humanities, and critical approaches to AI.