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

3 What is meaning?

1. How do Bender and Koller define form and meaning?
   Form is any observable realization of language (marks on a page, bytes, articulator movements). Meaning is the relation \(M \subseteq E \times I\) between expressions \(e\) and the communicative intents \(i\) they can be used to evoke; understanding is retrieving \(i\) from \(e\).

   • Bender & Koller, 2020, Climbing towards NLU (Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of ACL), §3, pp. 5186–5187
2. What is conventional (standing) meaning, and how does it relate to communicative intent?
   Standing meaning is what an expression means constantly across contexts: a linguistic system provides \(C \subseteq E \times S\), with meanings that have interpretations (e.g. can be tested for truth against a model of the world). A speaker picks \(e\) whose standing meaning fits their intent; the listener reconstructs \(s\) and uses context and guesses about the speaker to infer \(i\).
   • Bender & Koller, 2020, Climbing towards NLU (Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of ACL), §3, pp. 5186–5187
3. Why is the listener’s role active in communication? Give an example.
   Listeners must use context and hypotheses about the speaker’s mind to infer intent: in “The photographer asked me to do a Napoleon for the camera”, Napoleon means a particular pose; in “Never ask two China trips to the same party”, China trip means a person who recently visited China.
   • Bender & Koller, 2020, Climbing towards NLU (Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of ACL), §3, pp. 5186–5187