Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

3.2 Meaning and intelligence

1. How do Searle’s Chinese Room and Harnad’s symbol grounding problem bear on Bender and Koller’s argument?
   The Chinese Room shows form manipulation can look like understanding from outside; Harnad notes no one can learn Chinese word meanings from a Chinese dictionary alone. Learning a language requires grounding symbols, and modern LMs are trained (not just run) on form alone.
   • Bender & Koller, 2020, Climbing towards NLU (Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of ACL), §3.2, pp. 5187–5188