Related papers: Does Meaning Evolve?
Meaningful human-AI collaboration requires more than processing language; it demands a deeper understanding of symbols and their socially constructed meanings. While humans naturally interpret symbols through social interaction, AI systems…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Identifying temporal relations between events is an essential step towards natural language understanding. However, the temporal relation between two events in a story depends on, and is often dictated by, relations among other events.…
Many current NLP systems are built from language models trained to optimize unsupervised objectives on large amounts of raw text. Under what conditions might such a procedure acquire meaning? Our systematic experiments with synthetic data…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
The terms 'semantics' and 'ontology' are increasingly appearing together with 'explanation', not only in the scientific literature, but also in organizational communication. However, all of these terms are also being significantly…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
Ontologies formalise how the concepts from a given domain are interrelated. Despite their clear potential as a backbone for explainable AI, existing ontologies tend to be highly incomplete, which acts as a significant barrier to their more…
Time series interpretation aims to provide an explanation of what is observed in terms of its underlying processes. The present work is based on the assumption that the common classification-based approaches to time series interpretation…
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…
Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…
Temporal reasoning is the task of predicting temporal relations of event pairs. While temporal reasoning models can perform reasonably well on in-domain benchmarks, we have little idea of these systems' generalizability due to existing…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
Interpretable deep learning is a fundamental building block towards safer AI, especially when the deployment possibilities of deep learning-based computer-aided medical diagnostic systems are so eminent. However, without a computational…
Explanation mechanisms from the field of Counterfactual Thinking are a widely-used paradigm for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), as they follow a natural way of reasoning that humans are familiar with. However, all common…
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication…
Theory of Mind is commonly defined as the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, goals) to oneself, and to others. A large body of previous work - from the social sciences to artificial intelligence - has observed that Theory of…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…