Meta: This post is a relatively rough dump of some recent research thoughts; it's not one of our more polished posts, in terms of either clarity or rigor. You’ve been warned.

The Interoperable Semantics post and the Solomonoff Inductor Walks Into A Bar post each tackled the question of how different agents in the same world can coordinate on an ontology, so that language can work at all given only a handful of example usages of each word (similar to e.g. children learning new words). Both use natural latents as a central mathematical tool - one in a Bayesian probabilistic framework, the other in a minimum description length framework. Both focus mainly on nouns, i.e. interoperable-across-minds clusters of “objects” in the environment.

… and the two propose totally different models. In one, the interoperability of cluster labels (i.e. nouns) follows from natural latent conditions over different features of each [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) The Problem

(03:43) Two Previous Models: Naturality Over Objects vs Features

(07:34) Referents of Adjectives?

(10:49) One Implication: Adjectives Tend To Be Less Natural (Convergent) Than Nouns?

(12:38) How This Fits Into The Broader Gameplan

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.