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I'm not sure what your definition of meaning is. Take this example from the GPT3 paper: To do a "farduddle" means to jump up and down really fast. An example o

I'm not sure what your definition of meaning is. Take this example from the GPT3 paper: To do a "farduddle" means to jump up and down really fast. An example of a sentence that uses the word farduddle is: One day when I was playing tag with my little sister, she got really excited and she started doing these crazy farduddles. According to my understanding of the concept it must know something about meaning and is able to reason about it if it was able to generate this.

notahacker 6y ago
Depends what you're talking about by meaning. It correctly interprets the first part of the prompt as 'farduddle ~= jump' and the second part as an instruction to generate a sentence containing farduddle, possibly utilising a corpus of existing sentences containing jump in the context of 'really fast'. But that's also a series of instructions you could imagine as a DSL a relatively simple program could parse and generate a satisfactory response to. Which I believe the OP is classing as 'structure' since it's just performing translations based on familiar syntax. Understanding the concept of 'jumping' is a step further, before we get into the more philosophical stuff about qualia and whether things that can't jump can ever truly understand the experience of jumping...
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Right, in this context I define meaning as the relationship between symbols. Form would be how to structure a sentence (but that sentence wouldn't have to make sense). If the parent comment was making some kind of Chinese Room argument than I think that's not very helpful for the discussion. "GPT-3 learned nothing about meaning because no computer program can do that by definition". But I don't think they were trying to make that kind of argument as you seem to be suggesting because they said they were unsure if it learned anything about meaning.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
- ...And Morris? - Um, it actually already is a word. Tnetennba. - Good heavens, really? Could you, uh, use it in a sentence for us? - "Good morning. That's a nice Tnetennba" [1]. ______________ [1] Moss from IT Crowd on Countdown: https://youtu.be/g9ixvD0_CmM?t=52 https://youtu.be/g9ixvD0_CmM?t=52 Edit: to clarify, if you don't know what a word means, just seeing it used in a sentence won't necessarily tell you much about its meaning, so that a language model was able to generate a phrase with the word in it doesn't necessarily tells us it understands the word's meaning.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Maybe not, but the fact that it actually made a sentence with a word in it that it could not have possibly seen in the training data tells us that it understood something about the meaning of the instructions.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    The word was used because it was in the prompt and the prompt was constructed in such a way as to force it to use the new word in the place of an old word. No "understanding" is necessary, other than from the human constructing the prompt who needs to understand how the system works. In any case, it's a language model. It has no ability to "understand" anything. It can compute the probability of a token to follow from a sequence of tokens, and that's all. There's no "understanding" there, nobody made it to understand anything.
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      I'm using "understood" metaphorically similarly to how people say machine learning models "learn" something when they really just minimize a loss.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
        Ah, thanks for clarifying. In that case, can you explain the metaphor? What do you mean literally, when you say that GPT-3 "understands" something metaphorically? Edit: btw, "learning" in the context of machine learning is more of a term of trade with well-established connotations. For example, we have Tom Mitchell's definition of a machine learning system as "a system that improves its performance over time", etc. We don't have similarly established definitions for the "understanding" terminology. Hence my request for clarification. I literally don't understand what you mean that GPT-3 "understands" metaphorically.
        ma2rten 6y ago
        I'm using "understood" as "can apply in an unseen context". For example if you a human student understood a math concept it means they were able to use it in a new context and have not just memorized how to solve a specific problem. I think the more interesting question is the definition of meaning. I am thinking about meaning here as the relationship between symbols. So if you can explain what a words means, you can give a definition in terms of other words. If you "understood" what a word means, you have not just memorized the definition but can apply the word in unseen contexts.

notahacker 6y ago

Depends what you're talking about by meaning. It correctly interprets the first part of the prompt as 'farduddle ~= jump' and the second part as an instruction to generate a sentence containing farduddle, possibly utilising a corpus of existing sentences containing jump in the context of 'really fast'. But that's also a series of instructions you could imagine as a DSL a relatively simple program could parse and generate a satisfactory response to. Which I believe the OP is classing as 'structure' since it's just performing translations based on familiar syntax. Understanding the concept of 'jumping' is a step further, before we get into the more philosophical stuff about qualia and whether things that can't jump can ever truly understand the experience of jumping...

ma2rten 6y ago
Right, in this context I define meaning as the relationship between symbols. Form would be how to structure a sentence (but that sentence wouldn't have to make sense). If the parent comment was making some kind of Chinese Room argument than I think that's not very helpful for the discussion. "GPT-3 learned nothing about meaning because no computer program can do that by definition". But I don't think they were trying to make that kind of argument as you seem to be suggesting because they said they were unsure if it learned anything about meaning.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

- ...And Morris? - Um, it actually already is a word. Tnetennba. - Good heavens, really? Could you, uh, use it in a sentence for us? - "Good morning. That's a nice Tnetennba" [1]. ______________ [1] Moss from IT Crowd on Countdown: https://youtu.be/g9ixvD0_CmM?t=52 https://youtu.be/g9ixvD0_CmM?t=52 Edit: to clarify, if you don't know what a word means, just seeing it used in a sentence won't necessarily tell you much about its meaning, so that a language model was able to generate a phrase with the word in it doesn't necessarily tells us it understands the word's meaning.

ma2rten 6y ago
Maybe not, but the fact that it actually made a sentence with a word in it that it could not have possibly seen in the training data tells us that it understood something about the meaning of the instructions.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  The word was used because it was in the prompt and the prompt was constructed in such a way as to force it to use the new word in the place of an old word. No "understanding" is necessary, other than from the human constructing the prompt who needs to understand how the system works. In any case, it's a language model. It has no ability to "understand" anything. It can compute the probability of a token to follow from a sequence of tokens, and that's all. There's no "understanding" there, nobody made it to understand anything.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    I'm using "understood" metaphorically similarly to how people say machine learning models "learn" something when they really just minimize a loss.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      Ah, thanks for clarifying. In that case, can you explain the metaphor? What do you mean literally, when you say that GPT-3 "understands" something metaphorically? Edit: btw, "learning" in the context of machine learning is more of a term of trade with well-established connotations. For example, we have Tom Mitchell's definition of a machine learning system as "a system that improves its performance over time", etc. We don't have similarly established definitions for the "understanding" terminology. Hence my request for clarification. I literally don't understand what you mean that GPT-3 "understands" metaphorically.
      - ma2rten 6y ago
        I'm using "understood" as "can apply in an unseen context". For example if you a human student understood a math concept it means they were able to use it in a new context and have not just memorized how to solve a specific problem. I think the more interesting question is the definition of meaning. I am thinking about meaning here as the relationship between symbols. So if you can explain what a words means, you can give a definition in terms of other words. If you "understood" what a word means, you have not just memorized the definition but can apply the word in unseen contexts.