49 research outputs found
Semantics and the stratification of explanation in cognitive science
This work is concerned with a pervasive problem in Cognitive Science which
I have called the "stratificational" approach. I argue that the division into
"levels of explanation" that runs as a constant theme through much work
in Cognitive Science and in particular natural language semantics, is in direct conflict with neuroscientific evidence. I claim it is also in conflict with
a right understanding of the philosophical notion of "evidence". The neuroscientific work is linked with the philosophical problem to provide a critique of concrete cases of research within the natural language semantics
community. More recent neuroscientifically aware research is examined
and it is demonstrated that it suffers similar problems due to the same
deep running assumptions as those which effect traditional formalist theory. The contribution of this thesis is thought to be that of a demonstration
of the essential nature and indeed the ubiquity of the basic assumptions in
the field. Also, a new link is forged between the concerns of the formalists
and certain seemingly more abstract philosophical work. This link enables
us to see how much philosophical problems infect research into cognition
and language. It is argued that practical research in Cognitive Science simply cannot be seen to be independent of the philosophical basis of the entire
subject. The resulting picture of Cognitive Science and its place is outlined
and explored with special emphasis on what I have called the "Principle
of Semantic Indistinguishabliity" which says that the contribution of what
can be broadly termed "environment" is epitemologically opaque to our cognition. The importance of this principle is discussed.The purpose of this work is to draw out a fundamental thread of reasoning and methodology that underlies most traditional work, and some not
so traditional work, in Cognitive Science. It will be argued that this line
of reasoning is at odds with the implications of modern neuroscience and
cannot base a reasonable claim to "explain" human cognition. The picture
I shall identify is that which I shall call "stratified". This, in general, is
an attempt at explanation that divides into "levels of explanation", each
with its own concepts that are said to be essential to the explanation of
a phenomenon. There are specific and pragmatic manifestations of this, I
discuss these in Chapter 3 and 7 in particular. There are also more abstract expressions of the same tendency which I examine mainly in Chapter 6. One of the principle tasks is to demonstrate the links between the
assumptions of the more abstract formulations of this approach and th eir
pragmatic instantiations in work in Cognitive Science. This allows it to be
made clear that certain methodological problems are ubiquitous within the
field and are not simply a result of the particular pragmatics of a particular
research area.In Cognitive Science as a whole, it is generally appreciated today that
there are problems to do with integration of traditional formal systems and
the evolutionary and biological aspects of human cognition. One aim of
this work is exactly to give an argument, supported from work in the brain
sciences, that a certain methodology - particularly that enshrined within
formal systems in language semantics - is strongly denied its evidential
basis as a result of certain empirical considerations. It is also denied much
of its basis as a result of the incongruity between the original motivations
of logical formalism and the use to which this formalism is put today. The
conclusion of this is that Cognitive Science's role in certain areas is severely
limited and it crucially relies on an amount of empirical brain research in
places thought usually to be completely separate from the "low-level" evidence from neuroscience. Part of my thesis is that stratified systems and
particularly systems of formal logic within linguistics and semantics, cannot possibly be independent in the way imagined. There is also exploration
of a general point regarding the character of the relation between strata in
a stratified theory. There is, I shall argue, an irresolvable tension between
the desire to have separate strata which are both independent but related.
We shall see this both in concrete terms in the discussion of Fodor and in
the abstract in the discussion of McDowell.George Lakoffhas expressed agreement with this particular premise:
" ... linguistic results ... indicate that human reason uses
some of the same mechanisms involved in perception and ... human reason can be seen as growing out of perceptual and motor
mechanisms."1If this is correct, then I think that there are enormous implications for
Cognitive Science in its practise of semantics since the mechanisms of motor and perceptual systems impose radical constraints when applied in the
area of semantics.Given this, my aim is to demonstrate that certain seemingly theoryindependent areas of research in Cognitive Science such as linguistics and
natural language semantics are actually infected with damaging assumptions from certain misguided philosophical positions. The idea that we can
simply model things in Cognitive Science and wait for someone else to sort
out the theoretical structure into which all of the models will fit is not tenable. I shall demonstrate this in several concrete cases and couple this with
a critique from neuroscience which is crucially related to a more philosophical critique of fundamental assumptions. The structure of the work is as
follows. Firstly, I give an overview of foundational issues in Cognitive Science by discussing central works. Then, I introduce the main problems in
concrete form by way of an examination of certain approaches to inference
in formal semantics. Chapter 4 expands on this in an analysis of the notion of "compositionality" with reference to the "stratificational" approach
I find apparent in traditional work in Cognitive Science and the assumptions it disguises. Chapter 5 introduces the themes from neuroscience and
the relations they have to the philosophical critique in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, I demonstrate that the assumptions I have identified are present
even in work motivated by a desire to leave behind the formalist program.
I explain why this is the case and the implications this has for a correct
view of "evidence" in Cognitive Science. At this point, I deal with pertinent
objections to my view stemming from the parts of the discipline I have mentioned. Chapter 8 condenses the problem and shows the fundamentals of
the whole problem in relief, suggesting what all of the preceding means for
Cognitive Science
State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: a taxonomy and review
The ability to generalise well is one of the primary desiderata of natural
language processing (NLP). Yet, what `good generalisation' entails and how it
should be evaluated is not well understood, nor are there any common standards
to evaluate it. In this paper, we aim to lay the ground-work to improve both of
these issues. We present a taxonomy for characterising and understanding
generalisation research in NLP, we use that taxonomy to present a comprehensive
map of published generalisation studies, and we make recommendations for which
areas might deserve attention in the future. Our taxonomy is based on an
extensive literature review of generalisation research, and contains five axes
along which studies can differ: their main motivation, the type of
generalisation they aim to solve, the type of data shift they consider, the
source by which this data shift is obtained, and the locus of the shift within
the modelling pipeline. We use our taxonomy to classify over 400 previous
papers that test generalisation, for a total of more than 600 individual
experiments. Considering the results of this review, we present an in-depth
analysis of the current state of generalisation research in NLP, and make
recommendations for the future. Along with this paper, we release a webpage
where the results of our review can be dynamically explored, and which we
intend to up-date as new NLP generalisation studies are published. With this
work, we aim to make steps towards making state-of-the-art generalisation
testing the new status quo in NLP.Comment: 35 pages of content + 53 pages of reference
Representation Of Lexical Stylistic Features In Language Models' Embedding Space
The representation space built by pretrained Language Models (LMs) encodes
rich information about words and their relationships (e.g., similarity,
hypernymy/hyponymy, polysemy) as well as abstract semantic notions (e.g.,
intensity). In this paper, we demonstrate that lexical stylistic notions such
as complexity, formality, and figurativeness, can also be identified in this
space. We show that it is possible to derive a vector representation for each
of these stylistic notions, from only a small number of seed text pairs. Using
these vectors, we can characterize new texts in terms of these dimensions using
simple calculations in the corresponding embedding space. We perform
experiments on five datasets and find that static embeddings encode these
features more accurately at the level of words and phrases, whereas
contextualized LMs perform better on longer texts. The lower performance of
contextualized representations at the word level is partially attributable to
the anisotropy of their vector space, which can be corrected through techniques
like standardization to further improve performance.Comment: Accepted at *SEM 202