Semantics and Pragmatics
- Jackendoff's conceptual system refers to a relatively simple
form of semantics.
- It includes stuff like argument structure and adjectival
modifications of nouns.
- Semantics and pragmatics is more than that.
- The system has to be able to learn the meaning of a word.
- This is the symbol grounding problem, and my group (and others)
hav made some progress on it.
- Hopefully this work can be extended to develop active symbols
that are better at semantics.
- These might provide affordances that can be used, among many
other things, for resolving language processing ambiguities.
- Still, there is a question about systems.
- People learn systems (like decimal arithmetic), and this informs
their semantics.
