To Understand Language Is to Understand Generalization

Re:To Understand Language Is to Understand Generalization by canjobear on Friday December 17, 2021 @09:37PM (#29601023)

All languages have something analogous to words in this way, although it can be hard to know where to draw the boundaries sometimes.

Technically the smallest indivisible unit that bears meaning is the morpheme, not the word. For example the word “cats” in English consists of two morphemes, cat+s. The first morpheme can stand on its own as a word, but the second can’t.

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Re:To Understand Language Is to Understand Generalization by solarmist on Friday December 17, 2021 @10:09PM (#29601210)

I agree, but I think the trickier part is that the semantics of words are even blurrier/more ambiguous than the syntax.

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Re:To Understand Language Is to Understand Generalization by canjobear on Friday December 17, 2021 @10:18PM (#29601259)

Yeah, hence the turn away from dictionary definitions and things like WordNet towards continuous distributional vector representations in NLP.

I don’t think you could really give an uncontroversial symbolic definition for any natural word.

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