What is the importance of language studies today? What are the challenges, risks, and opportunities associated with the widespread use of large language models and other language technologies?

Elena Álvarez Mellado and Zoraida Callejas Carrión will address these and other questions related to the intersection of language, speech, and technology in the second session of “Humans on AIr: A Lecture Series on the Humanities, Language, and Artificial Intelligence”, to be held in the Salón de Grados of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting on Wednesday, April 30 at 1:00 p.m.

Elena Álvarez Mellado is a computational linguist and researcher with the Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval group at UNED. She has worked on language technology projects at various institutions, including the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Brandeis University in Massachusetts, the Digital Humanities Lab at UNED, and Fundéu. Her doctoral research focuses on the application of machine learning techniques to the detection of lexical borrowings in Spanish. She is also well known for her work in science communication in the field of linguistics. In 2017, she received the 22nd Miguel Delibes National Journalism Award for her article “Dangerous Metaphors: Cancer as a Battle”, published in eldiario.es.

Zoraida Callejas is a professor in the Department of Languages and Computer Systems at the University of Granada. Her research focuses on conversational systems and speech and language technologies. She currently coordinates the Spanish Speech Technologies Network, as well as several research projects, including CONVERSA, which aims to generate resources for conversational AI in Spanish and co-official languages, and TrustBoost, which focuses on developing more personalized and reliable conversational systems. She also coordinates the RTVE-UGR Chair, dedicated to conversational AI and its applications in the media. Zoraida participates in the European projects CRYSTAL and alt-edic4EU, as well as the COST Action YouthDMH, all of which explore applications of speech and language technologies in various domains, including mental health. She has been a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic), the University of Trento (Italy), Ulster University (UK), the Technical University of Berlin (Germany), the University of Ulm (Germany), and Télécom ParisTech (France), among others.

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