3 ms·

I still don't get it. In the linguistic part the only problem is to make to word->object mapping unambiguous. And it is trivial problem. If the world is fuzzy (

by bmacho 3y ago

I still don't get it. In the linguistic part the only problem is to make to word->object mapping unambiguous. And it is trivial problem. If the world is fuzzy (i don't think so) then is not a problem in linguistics. Yet linguists seem to aim for a language that eliminates ambiguity (see TFA). Where am I wrong?

sillymath 3y ago
theoretically you can introduce new words to be more precise, for example eskimos have many words for snow, from (1) that is because they use polysynthesis: a base word is attached to many different suffixes which change its meaning. So, while in the English language we might have a sentence describing snow, fusional languages such as the Eskimo-Aleut family will have long, complex words. So, you may solve the ambiguity problem by introducing a huge numbers of words, that could help a LLM, but humans need a relatively small vocabulary tailored to everyday use. So the tradeoff is reducing ambiguity and not increasing a lot the vocabulary. (1) https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for-snow/ https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for...
- bmacho 3y ago
  A more common example is the meme about women and men colors. Women have magenta and salmon, while men call both pink. This has not much to do with linguistics or eliminating ambiguity. You say 'pink', you mean 'pink', and if the other person wants to know which pink, they ask?
  - bmacho 3y ago
    edit: this was a strawmanning, colors are a non-issue. But there can be situations where there are 2 objects, you say a word to refer one of the objects, and your partner thinks about the other object, and neither of you think that it was ambiguous, so you don't clarify until it's too late. Like there is a dead bear and a bear cub, you say 'bring the bear' and you mean the cub, and they mean the dead bear.
turnsout 3y ago
Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the world. Think of something as basic as "chair." Is a love seat a couch or a chair, or both? What about a bench? A stool? An ottoman? A small table? A tree stump? Reasonable people will give different answers, and some answers will be nonbinary ("it's very chairlike but not strictly a chair"). Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.
tolciho 3y ago
The bear... no, not that bear, the other bear--yes, I know it's a dead bear... what, you call that a corpse and not a bear? Okay, the new corpse of a former bear, the one that is right over there... When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that (surprise!) people have different views, even if we restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or always, or never? Of course you could be more specific--pa vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-precise definition to mean something else, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they use 'bear' to talk about something else while still collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods. Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A shaved bear would be less fuzzy?

by bmacho 3y ago

sillymath 3y ago

theoretically you can introduce new words to be more precise, for example eskimos have many words for snow, from (1) that is because they use polysynthesis: a base word is attached to many different suffixes which change its meaning. So, while in the English language we might have a sentence describing snow, fusional languages such as the Eskimo-Aleut family will have long, complex words. So, you may solve the ambiguity problem by introducing a huge numbers of words, that could help a LLM, but humans need a relatively small vocabulary tailored to everyday use. So the tradeoff is reducing ambiguity and not increasing a lot the vocabulary. (1) https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for-snow/ https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for...

bmacho 3y ago
A more common example is the meme about women and men colors. Women have magenta and salmon, while men call both pink. This has not much to do with linguistics or eliminating ambiguity. You say 'pink', you mean 'pink', and if the other person wants to know which pink, they ask?
- bmacho 3y ago
  edit: this was a strawmanning, colors are a non-issue. But there can be situations where there are 2 objects, you say a word to refer one of the objects, and your partner thinks about the other object, and neither of you think that it was ambiguous, so you don't clarify until it's too late. Like there is a dead bear and a bear cub, you say 'bring the bear' and you mean the cub, and they mean the dead bear.

turnsout 3y ago

Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the world. Think of something as basic as "chair." Is a love seat a couch or a chair, or both? What about a bench? A stool? An ottoman? A small table? A tree stump? Reasonable people will give different answers, and some answers will be nonbinary ("it's very chairlike but not strictly a chair"). Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.

tolciho 3y ago

The bear... no, not that bear, the other bear--yes, I know it's a dead bear... what, you call that a corpse and not a bear? Okay, the new corpse of a former bear, the one that is right over there... When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that (surprise!) people have different views, even if we restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or always, or never? Of course you could be more specific--pa vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-precise definition to mean something else, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they use 'bear' to talk about something else while still collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods. Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A shaved bear would be less fuzzy?