Modelling meaning composition from formalism to mechanism

Abstract

Human thought and language have extraordinary expressive power because meaningful parts can be assembled into more complex semantic structures. This partly underlies our ability to compose meanings into endlessly novel configurations, and sets us apart from other species and current computing devices. Crucially, human behaviour, including language use and linguistic data, indicates that composing parts into complex structures does not threaten the existence of constituent parts as independent units in the system: parts and wholes exist simultaneously yet independently from one another in the mind and brain. This independence is evident in human behaviour, but it seems at odds with what is known about the brain's exquisite sensitivity to statistical patterns: everyday language use is productive and expressive precisely because it can go beyond statistical regularities. Formal theories in philosophy and linguistics explain this fact by assuming that language and thought are compositional : systems of representations that separate a variable (or role ) from its values ( fillers ), such that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the values assigned to the variables. The debate on whether and how compositional systems could be implemented in minds, brains and machines remains vigorous. However, it has not yet resulted in mechanistic models of semantic composition: how, then, are the constituents of thoughts and sentences put and held together? We review and discuss current efforts at understanding this problem, and we chart possible routes for future research. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition’.

How Computational Modeling Can Force Theory Building in Psychological Science

“…However, not all psychological models must be (or can be) evaluated against data directly. Theoretical computational models allow us to check if our ideas, when taken to their logical conclusions, hold up (e.g., Guest & Love, 2017;Martin, 2016Martin, , 2020Martin & Baggio, 2020;van Rooij, 2008). If a theory cannot lead to coherent specifications, it is our responsibility as scientists to amend, or more rarely, abandon it, in favour of one that does.…”

Challenges and Opportunities for Grounding Cognition

“…A likely possibility is that alternative approaches to grounding symbolic processing will develop that differ significantly from the grounded approach described here. Still another possibility is that non-grounded approaches may offer effective accounts, such as those found in Werning, Hinzen, and Machery (2012), Winter and Hampton (2017), Pylkkänen (2019), and the 2019 special issue on meaning composition in Philosophical Transitions of the Royal Society B (Martin & Baggio, 2020).…”

Meaning composition in minimal phrasal contexts: distinct ERP effects of intensionality and denotation

“…To understand the neurocognitive mechanisms of language comprehension it is necessary to investigate how the brain composes together the meanings of lexical and functional constituents. Progress has been made in recent years, at least in addressing possible neural correlates of the composition process, and research is gradually moving toward more explicit mechanistic proposals (for an overview, see Martin & Baggio, 2019). Yet, gaps remain in our knowledge of the cortical bases of semantic composition.…”