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The Singleton Fallacy: Why Current Critiques of Language Models Miss the Point
AI Sweden, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5100-0535
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Digital Systems, Data Science.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2811-7481
2021 (English)In: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, E-ISSN 2624-8212, Vol. 4, article id 682578Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This paper discusses the current critique against neural network-based Natural Language Understanding solutions known as language models. We argue that much of the current debate revolves around an argumentation error that we refer to as the singleton fallacy: the assumption that a concept (in this case, language, meaning, and understanding) refers to a single and uniform phenomenon, which in the current debate is assumed to be unobtainable by (current) language models. By contrast, we argue that positing some form of (mental) “unobtanium” as definiens for understanding inevitably leads to a dualistic position, and that such a position is precisely the original motivation for developing distributional methods in computational linguistics. As such, we argue that language models present a theoretically (and practically) sound approach that is our current best bet for computers to achieve language understanding. This understanding must however be understood as a computational means to an end.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Frontiers Media S.A. , 2021. Vol. 4, article id 682578
Keywords [en]
language models, meaning, natural language understanding, neural networks, representation learning
National Category
Philosophy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-56930DOI: 10.3389/frai.2021.682578Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85117916535OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-56930DiVA, id: diva2:1613272
Available from: 2021-11-22 Created: 2021-11-22 Last updated: 2025-09-23Bibliographically approved

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Sahlgren, MagnusCarlsson, Fredrik

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