The Principle of Compositionality in Natural Language

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A sentence is an ordered list of words, not just a bucket of words that the ordering doesn't matter. It's not just the bag of words, as we say, in natural language processing sometimes. It has a specific order, and this order obeys maps onto a specific kind of hierarchical structure - what linguists call parse trees. The meaning of the sentence, man bites dog, is different from the meaning of a sentence dog bites man. But then it seems that perhaps you can loosely apply a similar principle to say themeaning of a picture, for example.

Welcome to another episode of Sean Carroll's Mindscape. Today, we're joined by Raphaël Millière, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Columbia University. We'll be exploring the fascinating topic of how artificial intelligence thinks and processes information. As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, it's important to understand the mechanisms behind its decision-making processes. What are the algorithms and models that underpin AI, and how do they differ from human thought processes? How do machines learn from data, and what are the limitations of this learning? These are just some of the questions we'll be exploring in this episode. Raphaël will be sharing insights from his work in cognitive science, and discussing the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field. So join us as we dive into the mind of artificial intelligence and explore how it thinks.

[The above introduction was artificially generated by ChatGPT.]

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Raphaël Millière received a DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at the Center for Science and Society, and a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. He also writes and organizes events aimed at a broader audience, including a recent workshop on The Challenge of Compositionality for Artificial Intelligence.

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