Related papers: Meaning = Information + Evolution
Organized knowledge production can then be considered as the codification of communication. Communications leave traces that can be studied as indicators. Institutions can be considered as retention mechanisms functional for the…
Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific…
This paper motivates and develops a framework for understanding how the socio-technical systems surrounding AI development interact with social welfare. It introduces the concept of ``signaling'' from evolutionary game theory and…
This paper examines signalling when the sender exerts effort and receives benefits over time. Receivers only observe a noisy public signal about the effort, which has no intrinsic value. The modelling of signalling in a dynamic context…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or…
This paper is motivated by a series of (related) questions as to whether a computer can have pleasure and pain, what pleasure (and intensity of pleasure) is, and, ultimately, what concepts of emotion are. To determine what an emotion is, is…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
Since Searle's work deconstructing intent and intentionality in the realm of philosophy, the practical meaning of intent has received little attention in science and technology. Intentionality and context are both central to the scope of…
A huge amount of information is produced in digital form. The Semantic Web stems from the realisation that dealing efficiently with this production requires getting better at interlinking digital informational resources together. Its focus…
To a good extent, words can be understood as corresponding to patterns or categories that appeared in order to represent concepts and structures that are particularly important or useful in a given time and space. Words are characterized by…
In the spirit of the many recent simple models of evolution inspired by statistical physics, we put forward a simple model of the evolution of such models. Like its objects of study, it is (one supposes) in principle testable and capable of…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
Causality is pivotal to our understanding of the world, presenting itself in different forms: information-theoretic and relativistic, the former linked to the flow of information, the latter to the structure of space-time. Leveraging a…
Metaphors are part of everyday language and shape the way in which we conceptualize the world. Moreover, they play a multifaceted role in communication, making their understanding and generation a challenging task for language models (LMs).…
Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into machine-readable meaning representations. Currently, most semantic parsing methods are not able to utilize contextual information (e.g. dialogue and comments…
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
The slogan information is physical has been so successful that it led to some excess. Classical and quantum information can be thought of independently of any physical implementation. Pure information tasks can be realized using such…
This study is a preliminary exploration of the concept of informativeness -how much information a sentence gives about a word it contains- and its potential benefits to building quality word representations from scarce data. We propose…