The role of linguistics in the era of LLMs: With an emphasis on the pronoun “we”

This presentation explores the linguistic properties of the pronoun we, emphasizing its inclusive and exclusive uses within the Korean War Armistice Negotiation documents. By examining the nuanced role of we in expressing shared intentionality and fostering group dynamics, we delve into how this pronoun was strategically employed for persuasion and boundary-setting by both the United Nations (UN) and North Korean (NK) delegations. Adopting machine learning methods alongside traditional linguistic analysis, this study attempts to classify the contextual usage of we with minimal human labeling, achieving an accuracy of 73.9%. Statistical analyses, including relative frequency and chi-square tests, reveal no significant differences in the frequency of inclusive or exclusive we between the groups, though NK exhibited a slightly higher use of both forms. The findings highlight the potential of combining large language models (LLMs) and linguistic expertise to analyze contextually dependent language patterns. This research implies the criticality of understanding the dimension of functional competence, such as clusivity when applying LLMs to real-world contexts. In the era of LLMs, the role of linguistics is non-trivial, ensuring robust interpretative frameworks and providing guardrails for language models in capturing the complexities of human language

Chongwon Park is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His research interests include cognitive linguistics, Cognitive Grammar, and Natural Language Processing. He is the author of Reference Point and Case: A Cognitive Grammar Exploration of Korean (John Benjamins, 2019). His research articles have appeared in Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Language and Cognition, among others.