A team of linguists from six University of California campuses—including UC Davis—has been awarded a Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) grant from the UC Office of the President. The project, Leveraging California's Linguistic Diversity to Improve Large Language Models, will explore how AI tools like ChatGPT respond to the wide range of language varieties spoken across the state—and how these technologies can be improved to better serve California’s richly diverse population.

At UC Davis, the project brings together researchers from across multiple subfields of linguistics and cognitive science: Emily Morgan, David Corina, Georgia Zellou, Matthew Traxler, Fernanda Ferreira, Masoud Jasbi, Kenji Sagae, Santiago Barreda-Castañón, and Tamara Swaab. Their collaboration with colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Merced, UC Irvine, and UCLA highlights a growing commitment to ensuring that advances in language technology reflect the realities of the communities who use them.