The free energy principle and its implications to language learning and education

Hello, welcome everyone. It's March 14th or 15th, 2025, and we're in Active Inference Guest Stream 100. So congrats on the triple digits. We're here with you, Kanazawa, and we'll be discussing the free energy principle, language learning, and education. So we are looking forward to a presentation followed by a Q&A. If you're watching live, please feel free to write any questions in the chat. And thank you, Yu, for coming on and looking forward to your presentation. Thanks again. All right. Thank you so much for inviting me to this opportunity. And also, I would say it is not without some trepidation that I'm here because basically I'm an applied linguist or foreign language education researcher. And also I had a look at those YouTube page. And usually there are some like mathematical views or some scientific views. But what I usually do is, of course, some more pedagogy oriented or some psychology. But I do my best. And also, yeah, this is pretty much open interdisciplinary framework. So I try to use it or incorporate it or getting some insight or like a mixing insight from applied linguistics or second language acquisition, especially the instructional kind. And this new, very influential and promising idea of active influence of free energy principle. So I get to it. Okay. Yeah, maybe I need to acknowledge this first. So this work or my study project supported by some Japanese governmental Akenhi project. So I need to acknowledge that first. And yeah, so as I said, I had a look at those free energy principle literatures or some YouTube sites. But usually people don't talk about education or like language education, especially. But here's my background. So basically, if I was asked what I'm doing, what do I do? Well, the research field, of course, is more about some second language education or applied linguistics. That's my field. But there are a lot of different approaches there. This field is pretty interdisciplinary oriented. And one thing I have done for long is number two is vocabulary or formulaic sequences. That's more like learning foreign languages. The learning vocabulary, like what's that different aspects of vocabulary and stuff. And I published a book or like book chapter, mostly in Japanese though. Another topic that I started when I was a doctoral student is emotion, actually. Emotion is another pretty big topic, field in that I'm a research topic, especially from psychological, philosophical approaches, and also including cognitive science. Actually, the first opportunity that I came to know this free energy principle is from emotion literature, actually. So that's another thing. And also the third thing is pedagogy, foreign language education, especially something called active learning or dialogic learning, or some more like learning method, the student-centered learning method that is more engaging, or that's triggering student motivation. So these three things basically I have been doing. It's kind of expanding more, but basically this is it. And next one. Yeah, also another thing here. So today's presentation, this is based on this paper, The Free Energy Principle and its Implication to Language Learning and Education, a theoretical paper that I published last year, 2024. So it's, I talked about 4E cognition, prediction, accuracy, complexity, trade-off, interesting motivation by epistemic emotions, 4Skills, and other things there as well. So basically it will be there. And also this QLs or this ULL there is basically where you can learn more about that in case if you are interested more. And yeah, I'm from Japan, based in Japan, Osaka, the Kansai, the Western area, which is, you know, the second biggest part compared to like Tokyo, the Eastern part though. So in Japan, there has been a lot of focus or publication study about Free Energy Principle as well. Maybe it's nice to briefly mention these things there too. So especially like Professor Inui, he's based in Osaka, North Osaka, same place as mine as…