This paper outlines the ongoing research project “Not Just Semantics: Word Meaning Negotiation in Social Media and Spoken Interaction”. The goal of the project is to investigate how meanings of words (and phrases) are interactively negotiated in social media and in spoken interaction. This project will contribute towards a comprehensive theory of word meaning negotiation.

This paper considers how the kind of formal semantic objects used in TTR (a theory of types with records, Cooper 2013) might be related to the vector representations used in Eliasmith (2013). An advantage of doing this is that it would immediately give us a neural representation for TTR objects as Eliasmith relates vectors to neural activity in his semantic pointer architecture (SPA). This would be an alternative using convolution to the suggestions made by Cooper (2019) based on the phasing of neural activity. The project seems potentially hopeful since all complex TTR objects are constructed from labelled sets (essentially sets of ordered pairs consisting of labels and values) which might be seen as corresponding to the representation of structured objects which Eliasmith achieves using superposition and circular convolution.

A Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component can be used in a dialogue system to perform intent classification, returning an N-best list of hypotheses with corresponding confidence estimates. We perform an in-depth evaluation of 5 NLUs, focusing on confidence estimation. We measure and visualize calibration for the 10 best hypotheses on model level and rank level, and also measure classification performance. The results indicate a trade-off between calibration and performance. In particular, Rasa (with Sklearn classifier) had the best calibration but the lowest performance scores, while Watson Assistant had the best performance but a poor calibration.

In this paper we examine different meaning representations that are commonly used in different natural language applications today and discuss their limits, both in terms of the aspects of the natural language meaning they are modelling and in terms of the aspects of the application for which they are used.

Just as the meaning of words is tied to the communities in which they are used, so too is semantic change. But how does lexical semantic change manifest differently across different communities? In this work, we investigate the relationship between community structure and semantic change in 45 communities from the social media website Reddit. We use distributional methods to quantify lexical semantic change and induce a social network on communities, based on interactions between members. We explore the relationship between semantic change and the clustering coefficient of a community’s social network graph, as well as community size and stability. While none of these factors are found to be significant on their own, we report a significant effect of their three-way interaction. We also report on significant word-level effects of frequency and change in frequency, which replicate previous findings.

Starting from an existing account of semantic classification and learning from interaction formulated in a Probabilistic Type Theory with Records, encompassing Bayesian inference and learning with a frequentist flavour, we observe some problems with this account and provide an alternative account of classification learning that addresses the observed problems. The proposed account is also broadly Bayesian in nature but instead uses a linear transformation model for classification and learning.

We propose a probabilistic account of semantic inference and classification formulated in terms of probabilistic type theory with records, building on Cooper et. al. (2014) and Cooper et. al. (2015). We suggest probabilistic type theoretic formulations of Naive Bayes Classifiers and Bayesian Networks. A central element of these constructions is a type-theoretic version of a random variable. We illustrate this account with a simple language game combining probabilistic classification of perceptual input with probabilistic (semantic) inference.

We present a formal semantics (a version of Type Theory with Records) which places classifiers of perceptual information at the core of semantics. Using this framework, we present an account of the interpretation and classification of utterances referring to perceptually available situations (such as visual scenes). The account improves on previous work by clarifying the role of classifiers in a hybrid semantics combining statistical/neural classifiers with logical/inferential aspects of meaning. The account covers both discrete and probabilistic classification, thereby enabling learning, vagueness and other non-discrete linguistic phenomena.

Much work in contemporary computational semantics follows the distributional hypothesis (DH), which is understood as an approach to semantics according to which the meaning of a word is a function of its distribution over contexts which is represented as vectors (word embeddings) within a multi-dimensional semantic space. In practice, use is identified with occurrence in text corpora, though there are some efforts to use corpora containing multi-modal information. In this paper we argue that the distributional hypothesis is intrinsically misguided as a self-supporting basis for semantics, as Firth was entirely aware. We mention philosophical arguments concerning the lack of normativity within DH data. Furthermore, we point out the shortcomings of DH as a model of learning, by discussing a variety of linguistic classes that cannot be learnt on a distributional basis, including indexicals, proper names, and wh-phrases. Instead of pursuing DH, we sketch an account of the problematic learning cases by integrating a rich, Firthian notion of dialogue context with interactive learning in signalling games backed by in probabilistic Type Theory with Records. We conclude that the success of the DH in computational semantics rests on a post hoc effect: DS presupposes a referential semantics on the basis of which utterances can be produced, comprehended and analysed in the first place.

We test state of the art dialogue systems for their behaviour in response to user-initiated sub-dialogues, i.e. interactions where a system question is responded to with a question or request from the user, who thus initiates a sub-dialogue. We look at sub-dialogues both within a single app (where the sub-dialogue concerns another topic in the original domain) and across apps (where the sub-dialogue concerns a different domain). The overall conclusion of the tests is that none of the systems can be said to deal appropriately with user-initiated sub-dialogues.

Type theory has played an important role in specifying the formal connection between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation within the history of formal semantics. In recent years rich type theories developed for the semantics of programming languages have become influential in the semantics of natural language. The use of probabilistic reasoning to model human learning and cognition has become an increasingly important part of cognitive science. In this paper we offer a probabilistic formulation of a rich type theory, Type Theory with Records (TTR), and we illustrate how this framework can be used to approach the problem of semantic learning. Our probabilistic version of TTR is intended to provide an interface between the cognitive process of classifying situations according to the types that they instantiate, and the compositional semantics of natural language.