Related papers: What does it mean to understand language?
Language decoding studies have identified word representations which can be used to predict brain activity in response to novel words and sentences (Anderson et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2018). The unspoken assumption of these studies is…
Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text,…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
For a system to understand natural language, it needs to be able to take natural language text and answer questions given in natural language with respect to that text; it also needs to be able to follow instructions given in natural…
Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are two complementary disciplines that study language from different perspectives. Psycholinguistics focuses on the cognitive processes involved in language production and comprehension, while…
Language models learn and represent language differently than humans; they learn the form and not the meaning. Thus, to assess the success of language model explainability, we need to consider the impact of its divergence from a user's…
One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to learn meaningful representations for natural language expressions, but what this entails is not always clear. A variety of new linguistic behaviours present themselves embodied as computers,…
Despite differing from the human language processing mechanism in implementation and algorithms, current language models demonstrate remarkable human-like or surpassing language capabilities. Should computational language models be employed…
Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at…
Recent artificial neural networks that process natural language achieve unprecedented performance in tasks requiring sentence-level understanding. As such, they could be interesting models of the integration of linguistic information in the…
We can define a neural network that can learn to recognize objects in less than 100 lines of code. However, after training, it is characterized by millions of weights that contain the knowledge about many object types across visual scenes.…
The mental lexicon is a complex cognitive system representing information about the words/concepts that one knows. Decades of psychological experiments have shown that conceptual associations across multiple, interactive cognitive levels…
How does language inform our downstream thinking? In particular, how do humans make meaning from language--and how can we leverage a theory of linguistic meaning to build machines that think in more human-like ways? In this paper, we…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
Human languages differ widely in their forms, each having distinct sounds, scripts, and syntax. Yet, they can all convey similar meaning. Do different languages converge on a shared neural substrate for conceptual meaning? We used language…
Thousands of different forms (words) are associated with thousands of different meanings (concepts) in a language computer model. Reasonable agreement with reality is found for the number of languages in a family and the Hamming distances…
Humans understand language based on the rich background knowledge about how the physical world works, which in turn allows us to reason about the physical world through language. In addition to the properties of objects (e.g., boats require…
Visual perception and language understanding are - fundamental components of human intelligence, enabling them to understand and reason about objects and their interactions. It is crucial for machines to have this capacity to reason using…
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Humans use multiple senses to comprehend the environment. Vision and language are two of the most vital senses since they allow us to easily communicate our thoughts and perceive the world around us. There has been a lot of interest in…