5,298 research outputs found
Don't Blame Distributional Semantics if it can't do Entailment
Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational
Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such
as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in
state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical
status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and
cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it
be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic
expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully
adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects
of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and
certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests
on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression
meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative
intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers
do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its
own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the
role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition,
its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on
Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019), Gothenburg, Swede
Suszko's Problem: Mixed Consequence and Compositionality
Suszko's problem is the problem of finding the minimal number of truth values
needed to semantically characterize a syntactic consequence relation. Suszko
proved that every Tarskian consequence relation can be characterized using only
two truth values. Malinowski showed that this number can equal three if some of
Tarski's structural constraints are relaxed. By so doing, Malinowski introduced
a case of so-called mixed consequence, allowing the notion of a designated
value to vary between the premises and the conclusions of an argument. In this
paper we give a more systematic perspective on Suszko's problem and on mixed
consequence. First, we prove general representation theorems relating
structural properties of a consequence relation to their semantic
interpretation, uncovering the semantic counterpart of substitution-invariance,
and establishing that (intersective) mixed consequence is fundamentally the
semantic counterpart of the structural property of monotonicity. We use those
to derive maximum-rank results proved recently in a different setting by French
and Ripley, as well as by Blasio, Marcos and Wansing, for logics with various
structural properties (reflexivity, transitivity, none, or both). We strengthen
these results into exact rank results for non-permeable logics (roughly, those
which distinguish the role of premises and conclusions). We discuss the
underlying notion of rank, and the associated reduction proposed independently
by Scott and Suszko. As emphasized by Suszko, that reduction fails to preserve
compositionality in general, meaning that the resulting semantics is no longer
truth-functional. We propose a modification of that notion of reduction,
allowing us to prove that over compact logics with what we call regular
connectives, rank results are maintained even if we request the preservation of
truth-functionality and additional semantic properties.Comment: Keywords: Suszko's thesis; truth value; logical consequence; mixed
consequence; compositionality; truth-functionality; many-valued logic;
algebraic logic; substructural logics; regular connective
LOGICAL ANALYSIS AND LATER MOHIST LOGIC: SOME COMPARATIVE REFLECTIONS [abstract]
Any philosophical method that treats the analysis of the meaning of a sentence or expression in terms of a decomposition into a set of conceptually basic constituent parts must do some theoretical work to explain the puzzles of intensionality. This is because intensional phenomena appear to violate the principle of compositionality, and the assumption of compositionality is the principal justification for thinking that an analysis will reveal the real semantical import of a sentence or expression through a method of decomposition. Accordingly, a natural strategy for dealing with intensionality is to argue that it is really just an isolable, aberrant class of linguistic phenomena that poses no general threat to the thesis that meaning is basically compositional. On the other hand, the later Mohists give us good reason to reject this view. What we learn from them is that there may be basic limitations in any analytical technique that presupposes that meaning is perspicuously represented only when it has been fully decomposed into its constituent parts. The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain why the Mohists found the issue of intensionality to be so important in their investigations of language, and (b) defend the view that Mohist insights reveal basic limitations in any technique of analysis that is uncritically applied with a decompositional approach in mind, as are those that are often pursued in the West in the context of more general epistemological and metaphysical programs
How to Hintikkize a Frege
The paper deals with the main contribution of the Finnish logician Jaakko Hintikka: epistemic logic, in particular the 'static' version of the system based on the formal analysis of the concepts of knowledge and belief.
I propose to take a different look at this philosophical logic and to consider it from the opposite point of view of the philosophy of logic. At first, two theories of meaning are described and associated with two competing theories of linguistic competence. In a second step, I draw the conclusion that Hintikka's epistemic logic constitutes a sort of internalisation of meaning, by the introduction of epistemic modal operators into an object language.
In this respect, to view meaning as the result of a linguistic competence makes epistemic logic nothing less than a logic of unified meaning and understanding
Language, logic and ontology: uncovering the structure of commonsense knowledge
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 knowledge, should itself be used as a guide to discovering the structure of commonsense knowledge. In addition to suggesting a systematic method to the discovery of the structure of commonsense knowledge, the method we propose seems to also provide an explanation for a number of phenomena in natural language, such as metaphor, intensionality, and the semantics of nominal compounds. Admittedly, our ultimate goal is quite ambitious, and it is no less than the systematic ‘discovery’ of a well-typed
ontology of commonsense knowledge, and the subsequent formulation of the longawaited goal of a meaning algebra
Does the Principle of Compositionality Explain Productivity? For a Pluralist View of the Role of Formal Languages as Models
One of the main motivations for having a compositional semantics is the account of the productivity of natural languages. Formal languages are often part of the account of productivity, i.e., of how beings with finite capaci- ties are able to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of sen- tences, by offering a model of this process. This account of productivity con- sists in the generation of proofs in a formal system, that is taken to represent the way speakers grasp the meaning of an indefinite number of sentences. The informational basis is restricted to what is represented in the lexicon. This constraint is considered as a requirement for the account of productivity, or at least of an important feature of productivity, namely, that we can grasp auto- matically the meaning of a huge number of complex expressions, far beyond what can be memorized. However, empirical results in psycholinguistics, and especially particular patterns of ERP, show that the brain integrates informa- tion of different sources very fast, without any felt effort on the part of the speaker. This shows that formal procedures do not explain productivity. How- ever, formal models are still useful in the account of how we get at the seman- tic value of a complex expression, once we have the meanings of its parts, even if there is no formal explanation of how we get at those meanings. A practice-oriented view of modeling gives an adequate interpretation of this re- sult: formal compositional semantics may be a useful model for some ex- planatory purposes concerning natural languages, without being a good model for dealing with other explananda
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