6,363 research outputs found
Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP
We survey 146 papers analyzing "bias" in NLP systems, finding that their
motivations are often vague, inconsistent, and lacking in normative reasoning,
despite the fact that analyzing "bias" is an inherently normative process. We
further find that these papers' proposed quantitative techniques for measuring
or mitigating "bias" are poorly matched to their motivations and do not engage
with the relevant literature outside of NLP. Based on these findings, we
describe the beginnings of a path forward by proposing three recommendations
that should guide work analyzing "bias" in NLP systems. These recommendations
rest on a greater recognition of the relationships between language and social
hierarchies, encouraging researchers and practitioners to articulate their
conceptualizations of "bias"---i.e., what kinds of system behaviors are
harmful, in what ways, to whom, and why, as well as the normative reasoning
underlying these statements---and to center work around the lived experiences
of members of communities affected by NLP systems, while interrogating and
reimagining the power relations between technologists and such communities
QNRs: toward language for intelligent machines
Impoverished syntax and nondifferentiable vocabularies make natural language a poor medium for neural representation learning and applications. Learned, quasilinguistic neural representations (QNRs) can upgrade words to embeddings and syntax to graphs to provide a more expressive and computationally tractable medium. Graph-structured, embedding-based quasilinguistic representations can support formal and informal reasoning, human and inter-agent communication, and the development of scalable quasilinguistic corpora with characteristics of both literatures and associative memory.
To achieve human-like intellectual competence, machines must be fully literate, able not only to read and learn, but to write things worth retaining as contributions to collective knowledge. In support of this goal, QNR-based systems could translate and process natural language corpora to support the aggregation, refinement, integration, extension, and application of knowledge at scale. Incremental development of QNRbased models can build on current methods in neural machine learning, and as systems mature, could potentially complement or replace today’s opaque, error-prone “foundation models” with systems that are more capable, interpretable, and epistemically reliable. Potential applications and implications are broad
Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding
In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)
Memory-Based Lexical Acquisition and Processing
Current approaches to computational lexicology in language technology are
knowledge-based (competence-oriented) and try to abstract away from specific
formalisms, domains, and applications. This results in severe complexity,
acquisition and reusability bottlenecks. As an alternative, we propose a
particular performance-oriented approach to Natural Language Processing based
on automatic memory-based learning of linguistic (lexical) tasks. The
consequences of the approach for computational lexicology are discussed, and
the application of the approach on a number of lexical acquisition and
disambiguation tasks in phonology, morphology and syntax is described.Comment: 18 page
- …