Grounding Meaning: Composition versus Abstraction

I recently read an interesting paper, How Is Meaning Grounded in Dictionary Definitions? The abstract follows:
Meaning cannot be based on dictionary definitions all the way down: at some point the circularity of definitions must be broken in some way, by grounding the meanings of certain words in sensorimotor categories learned from experience or shaped by [...]

Ockham’s Razor is Dull

Ockham’s razor is the principle that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. There are many different interpretations of Ockham’s razor. For me, the idea that simplicity is a guide to truth is the core of Ockham’s razor.
For any set of observations, there are an infinite number of theories that can fit the observations, with [...]

Everything Evolves

What is evolution? There are three main components to evolution: variation, heredity, and differential fitness. The best definition I have seen is in Robert Brandon’s Concepts and Methods in Evolutionary Biology:
The following three statements are crucial components of the Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) theory of evolution:

Variation: There is (significant) variation in morphological, physiological and behavioral traits [...]

Genius, Sustained Effort, and Passion

It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
— Mary Henle
There seems to be a growing consensus that genius is all about hard work; really hard work, for at least a decade. What can motivate that kind of [...]

The Book That Changed My Life

People like to say that a certain book “changed their life”: The quoted phrase “book that changed my life” gets 61,000 hits on Google. I have some favourite books, but can I honestly say that one of them significantly changed my life? It seems more likely that my life has been influenced by the gestalt [...]

The Seductive Power of Mathematics

I believe that math is very important: My first paper was mathematical (How many ways can an N-dimensional hypercube be unfolded into (N-1)-dimensional space?) and my most recent paper was mathematical (How can a very large tensor be decomposed with limited RAM?). But medan agan: everything in moderation; nothing in excess. In machine learning and [...]

Why Computational Linguistics?

I was thinking about what to say to a student who is contemplating a career in computational linguistics. How can I convey my enthusiasm? How can I explain my fascination with language? Here are some of the things that came to mind:
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AI Success Stories

I’ve been invited to give a talk on AI Success Stories, so I’ve compiled a list of things that illustrate progress in AI research. By success, for the purpose of this talk, I mean something that is interesting and impressive to a wide audience, rather than something that is successful in terms of commercial or [...]

The Evolution of Movies

In a previous post, I discussed multiple, independent, simultaneous discovery in science and technology, which supports the claim that science evolves. The authors of Multiple Discovery devote a chapter to arts and literature, but their main focus is science. I was thinking about multiple, independent, simultaneous creation in the arts, and I recalled several cases [...]

A Scientific Approach to Morals and Ethics

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience. — Albert Einstein
The traditional view is that science has nothing to say about ethics and morality. Science tells us what is and morality tells us what ought to be. You can’t get ought [...]