Conceptual spaces
by Peter Gärdenfors · first published 2000
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References for you and the other poster who asked: Peter Gärdenfors: Conceptual Spaces - the Geometry of Thought. MIT Press 2000 (Paperback 2004). It is very easy reading. The problems of geometric meaning theory are compositionality and quantification - how to get the expressivity of…
on “A computational linguistic farce in three acts” ↗…I've heard whole lectures about whether fruit salad really is a salad, and the sandwich examples, too. In my opinion, geometric meaning theories capture the associated problems fairly well, for example Conceptual Spaces. In linguistics, prototype theory and related approaches have dealt with them since the 1970s. That is not to say that the problems are solved but in my opinion many problems come from an artificial focus…
on “Salad Theory” ↗thanks , this is relevant to Rosch's prototype theory I've been reading on recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory, and also Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces, which is more modern and has some neurophysiological basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_space OP, sorry for hijacking the thread
on “The Grammar of Frames” ↗…general idea (using word frequencies in context) is Firth's distributional hypothesis [0]. Related to this is the idea of a distributional representation which is covered by Gardenfors in his book on conceptual spaces. For word2vec and such, several papers in this year's TACL explain why these methods should work [1,2]. [0] https://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Distributiona... [1] https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/viewFile/742... [2]https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/viewFile/809...
on “Facebook releases 300-dimensional pretrained Fasttext vectors for 90 languages” ↗…out of it was to stop thinking of it as a chatbot or knowledge engine, and instead try to model how it actually works on a structural level. The closest parallel I’ve found is Peter Gärdenfors’ work on conceptual spaces, where meaning isn’t symbolic but geometric. Fedorenko’s research on predictive sequencing in the brain fits too. In both cases, the idea is that language follows a trajectory through a shaped mental…
on “GPT-5.2” ↗