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Very interesting. Can a language define all it's concepts with language alone? I.e Can a language map all it's concepts to words and other concepts defined by

Very interesting. Can a language define all it's concepts with language alone? I.e Can a language map all it's concepts to words and other concepts defined by just words. Is there some sort of Godel's incompleteness theorem for language?

canjobear 9y ago
> Can a language map all it's concepts to words and other concepts defined by just words. I don't see why natural language would have this property. It is certainly possible to construct codes such that the distribution over codewords does not have this property.
- ragebol 9y ago
  I also don't see why it would, but then that would of course be a limit to the idea in the paper. I'm amazed that what the paper shows even works.
  - letlambda 9y ago
    It seems extremely unlikely to me that it wouldn't. I conjecture that no such word exists in any widely used human language. This would be a word who's meaning is not contained in the span of meanings of all other words in the language. Can you think of one in english (or your native language)? You won't find it in any dictionary, since all those words have descriptions in terms of other words.
    - pechay 9y ago
      Gullible?
      - letlambda 9y ago
        easily deceived
    - ragebol 9y ago
      The example I've been thinking about was 'pain', which, according to Wikipedia, is "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage." The native Dutch word "Gezelligheid" has no direct English translation and thus apparently has a wiki page in English [0]. Now I wonder what the relevance is of the distance between word vectors from different languages relating to nearly the same concept (e.g Gezelligheid to Cozyness) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid
mike_n 9y ago
actually, it's theoretically a hard problem -- https://aclanthology.info/pdf/J/J86/J86-4003.pdf https://aclanthology.info/pdf/J/J86/J86-4003.pdf I would have thought that they needed to 'ground' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem) at least one shared reference word/concept so they could proceed to define everything relative to that and thereby communicate effectively and know how to map different languages to the same latent space. But I guess perhaps one can infer/approximate it statistically -- https://cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/discriminative-bilingual-lexicon-induction.pdf https://cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/discriminative-bilin...

canjobear 9y ago

> Can a language map all it's concepts to words and other concepts defined by just words. I don't see why natural language would have this property. It is certainly possible to construct codes such that the distribution over codewords does not have this property.

ragebol 9y ago
I also don't see why it would, but then that would of course be a limit to the idea in the paper. I'm amazed that what the paper shows even works.
- letlambda 9y ago
  It seems extremely unlikely to me that it wouldn't. I conjecture that no such word exists in any widely used human language. This would be a word who's meaning is not contained in the span of meanings of all other words in the language. Can you think of one in english (or your native language)? You won't find it in any dictionary, since all those words have descriptions in terms of other words.
  - pechay 9y ago
    Gullible?
    - letlambda 9y ago
      easily deceived
  - ragebol 9y ago
    The example I've been thinking about was 'pain', which, according to Wikipedia, is "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage." The native Dutch word "Gezelligheid" has no direct English translation and thus apparently has a wiki page in English [0]. Now I wonder what the relevance is of the distance between word vectors from different languages relating to nearly the same concept (e.g Gezelligheid to Cozyness) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid

mike_n 9y ago

actually, it's theoretically a hard problem -- https://aclanthology.info/pdf/J/J86/J86-4003.pdf https://aclanthology.info/pdf/J/J86/J86-4003.pdf I would have thought that they needed to 'ground' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem) at least one shared reference word/concept so they could proceed to define everything relative to that and thereby communicate effectively and know how to map different languages to the same latent space. But I guess perhaps one can infer/approximate it statistically -- https://cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/discriminative-bilingual-lexicon-induction.pdf https://cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/discriminative-bilin...