Related papers: Dynamics of Meaning
"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 thesis investigates the connection between quantum theory, thermodynamics and information theory. Theories with structure similar to that of quantum theory are considered, mathematically described by the framework of "Generalized…
A common method of making a theory more understandable, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation…
The concept of random dynamical system is a comparatively recent development combining ideas and methods from the well developed areas of probability theory and dynamical systems. Due to our inaccurate knowledge of the particular physical…
Argumentation is a process of evaluating and comparing a set of arguments. A way to compare them consists in using a ranking-based semantics which rank-order arguments from the most to the least acceptable ones. Recently, a number of such…
Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the…
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
The classical view of epistemic logic is that an agent knows all the logical consequences of their knowledge base. This assumption of logical omniscience is often unrealistic and makes reasoning computationally intractable. One approach to…
We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…
We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to…
We propose a new approach to define chaos in dynamical systems from the point of view of Information Dynamics. Observation of chaos in reality depends upon how to observe it, for instance, how to take the scale in space and time. Therefore…
Information theory is built on probability measures and by definition a probability measure has total mass 1. Probability measures are used to model uncertainty, and one may ask how important it is that the total mass is one. We claim that…
A simple framework for reasoning under uncertainty and intervention is introduced. This is achieved in three steps. First, logic is restated in set-theoretic terms to obtain a framework for reasoning under certainty. Second, this framework…
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of…
This paper establishes a dual theory about knowledge and argumentation. Our idea is rooted at both epistemic logic and argumentation theory, and we aim to merge these two fields, not just in a superficial way but to thoroughly disclose the…
Concepts of everyday use like energy, heat, and temperature have acquired a precise meaning after the development of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics provides the basis for understanding how heat and work are related and with the general…
It is quite exceptional, if it ever happens, that a new conceptual domain be built from scratch. Usually, it is developed and mastered in interaction, both positive and negative, with other more operational existing domains. Few reasoning…
In a previous paper, we introduced an axiomatic system for information thermodynamics, deriving an entropy function that includes both thermodynamic and information components. From this function we derived an entropic probability…
Computational simulations are a popular method for testing hypotheses about the emergence of communication. This kind of research is performed in a variety of traditions including language evolution, developmental psychology, cognitive…