Academic Journal

Provable Limitations of Acquiring Meaning from Ungrounded Form: What Will Future Language Models Understand?

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Provable Limitations of Acquiring Meaning from Ungrounded Form: What Will Future Language Models Understand?
المؤلفون: William Merrill, Yoav Goldberg, Roy Schwartz, Noah A. Smith
المصدر: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol 9, Pp 1047-1060 (2021)
بيانات النشر: The MIT Press, 2021.
سنة النشر: 2021
المجموعة: LCC:Computational linguistics. Natural language processing
مصطلحات موضوعية: Computational linguistics. Natural language processing, P98-98.5
الوصف: AbstractLanguage models trained on billions of tokens have recently led to unprecedented results on many NLP tasks. This success raises the question of whether, in principle, a system can ever “understand” raw text without access to some form of grounding. We formally investigate the abilities of ungrounded systems to acquire meaning. Our analysis focuses on the role of “assertions”: textual contexts that provide indirect clues about the underlying semantics. We study whether assertions enable a system to emulate representations preserving semantic relations like equivalence. We find that assertions enable semantic emulation of languages that satisfy a strong notion of semantic transparency. However, for classes of languages where the same expression can take different values in different contexts, we show that emulation can become uncomputable. Finally, we discuss differences between our formal model and natural language, exploring how our results generalize to a modal setting and other semantic relations. Together, our results suggest that assertions in code or language do not provide sufficient signal to fully emulate semantic representations. We formalize ways in which ungrounded language models appear to be fundamentally limited in their ability to “understand”.
نوع الوثيقة: article
وصف الملف: electronic resource
اللغة: English
تدمد: 2307-387X
Relation: https://doaj.org/toc/2307-387X
DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00412/107385/Provable-Limitations-of-Acquiring-Meaning-from
DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00412
URL الوصول: https://doaj.org/article/01b20bd81c594f82968f4a363577d1ef
رقم الانضمام: edsdoj.01b20bd81c594f82968f4a363577d1ef
قاعدة البيانات: Directory of Open Access Journals
الوصف
تدمد:2307387X
DOI:10.1162/tacl_a_00412/107385/Provable-Limitations-of-Acquiring-Meaning-from