Academic seminar highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity

30/4/2025

The union of Linguistics and Computer Science was the central theme of the academic seminar held on Wednesday (30) at IMPA Tech. João Victor Miranda e Silva, a doctoral student in Language Studies (PUC-Rio), was the speaker invited by Professor Uéverton Souza, organizer of the cycle of weekly meetings with undergraduate students.

Silva presented the project “Exploring linguistic anomalies in schizophrenia with a large language model: an integrative approach between formal linguistics and computational methods”, developed as part of his doctoral research. The work investigates linguistic patterns associated with schizophrenia, through an exploratory experiment with the BERT language model.

In his projects, the doctoral student develops linguistic analyses and applies machine learning techniques to investigate large-scale textual productions by individuals with schizophrenia. The research was supervised and co-supervised by IMPA Tech professors Cilene Rodrigues and Emilio Vital Brazil, respectively. The work contributes to the understanding of grammar in atypical contexts and to the advancement of computational methodologies applied to language.

Computer Science came into the study to help organize and process the information analyzed. “Using data that is already available on the internet, we created a large database and used algorithms to quantify language, speeding up the identification and investigation processes in schizophrenia,” explained the doctoral student.

In addition to his doctorate at PUC-Rio, Silva is a student monitor for the Linguistic Skills and Introduction to Data Science courses at IMPA Tech. “I already know many of you, so it’s great to be able to present my work in an interdisciplinary area that mixes the humanities and the exact sciences. There is a very fruitful border between linguistics and computer science,” he said.

The doctoral student introduced the lecture by explaining the impact of schizophrenia on human language. “Affections are based on combinatorial processes in grammar. Schizophrenia leads to the production of simpler sentences, less use of defined nominal expressions, agrammaticality due to faulty syntactic operations and anomalous reference.”

He then described to the undergraduates how the data was processed computationally in the study. “BERT is a language model that uses tokenization techniques to understand patterns in language. You start with a preliminary alphabet, which is a collection of tokens. Then an algorithm goes through the data set and analyzes which tokens are the most frequent. It does this until it reaches a predefined limit,” he explained.

For student Joênio José Milagre, it was a very useful meeting. “I really enjoyed it. It’s interesting to see a seminar in an area I’m studying and understand how the applications work in practice, especially on a current subject that is of interest to everyone.”

The student also highlighted the importance of integrating different areas of knowledge. “Interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly necessary, given that the problems of our time are becoming more and more difficult. More and more assertive solutions are emerging from the integration of Linguistics with other areas of knowledge, which generate more robust studies.”

At the end of the presentation, Silva highlighted the personal connection with the undergraduate students and reiterated the importance of studies adopting a broader perspective. “Interdisciplinarity brings knowledge together and allows a dialog for all the areas involved. These students are a bright future for science in our country and they show this even in the way they receive new knowledge. We see that they are willing to learn about new research opportunities and that they establish good dialogues during their presentations, as they did in mine,” he concluded.

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