TITRE : Linguistic theory and deep language models
BIOGRAPHIE
Yair LAKRETZ is a CNRS Research Scientist at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) in Paris, where he heads the Neuro-Linguae-AI team. His research focuses the neural mechanisms underlying language processing, particularly how the human brain and artificial intelligence systems encode and compute complex linguistic structures. He investigates these questions by combining the analysis of neural models (AI) with empirical studies on humans, utilizing neuroimaging techniques including fMRI, E/MEG, and intracranial recordings.
RÉFÉRENCES
Lakretz, Y., Hupkes, D., Vergallito, A., Marelli, M., Baroni, M., & Dehaene, S. (2021). Mechanisms for handling nested dependencies in neural-network language models and humans. Cognition, 213, 104699.
Evanson, L., Lakretz, Y., & King, J. R. (2023). Language acquisition: do children and language models follow similar learning stages?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (pp. 12205-12218).
Lakretz, Y., Desbordes, T., Hupkes, D., & Dehaene, S. (2022). Can transformers process recursive nested constructions, like humans?. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 3226-3232).
Diego Simon, P. J., d’Ascoli, S., Chemla, E., Lakretz, Y., & King, J. R. (2024). A polar coordinate system represents syntax in large language models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37, 105375-105396. Rambaud, V., Mascarenhas, S., & Lakretz, Y. (2025). MapFormer: Self-Supervised Learning of Cognitive Maps with Input-Dependent Positional Embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19279.