SRI Seminar Series: Kyle Mahowald, “How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models” – Mar. 25, 2026

Session Description

The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.

Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion.

In this talk, Mahowald will explore how experiments with filtered pretraining and mechanistic interpretability can shed light on the structure of human language. By using language models as tools for scientific inquiry, his work investigates whether—and how—these systems can offer meaningful insights into the mechanisms of human language processing.