In the first part of the talk I will describe a general context which, in some specific situations, permits us to give a cohomological interpretation to the Langlands-Shahidi theory of L-functions. In the second part of the talk, I will specialize to the context of the general linear group over a totally imaginary base field F, and discuss some recent results of mine on the special values of Rankin-Selberg L-functions for GL(n) x GL(m) over such an F. The talk is based on my preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03393

We will give an explicit construction of the regular quotient of Morrissey-Ngô in the case of a symmetric pair. In the case of a quasisplit form (i.e. the regular centralizer group scheme is abelian), we will give a Galois description of the regular centralizer group scheme using parabolic covers. We will then describe how the nonseparated structure of the regular quotient recovers the spectral description of Hitchin fibers given by Schapostnik for U(n,n) Higgs bundles. This work is joint with B. Morrissey.